Leaders of Modern Finance Ep. 14 – Lives Over Profits, Hosted by Ben Murray ft. Krista Dusil

On this episode of the Leaders of Modern Finance podcast, Krista Dusil, CFO at Be The Match, joins host Ben Murray, Founder of The SaaS CFO. Be The Match is a not-for-profit organization operated by the National Marrow Donor Program. Be The Match manages the largest blood stem cell registry to save lives through cellular therapy procedures like bone marrow or stem cell transplants. 

Early Career

Like many CFOs, Krista’s career started in public accounting, working in audit at Arthur Andersen. Early in her career, she had the opportunity to move to a large healthcare company based in Minneapolis, UnitedHealth Group, where she spent 20 years.

Her career path at UHG was far from linear. Like most people, she envisioned her career path as being one that went from one rung of the ladder to the next in her chosen field of expertise: finance. 

Her first ten years were spent in traditional financial roles like accounting, financial planning and analysis, and mergers and acquisitions. But then things changed for her and she left finance to tackle roles in operations, in product, and in the international division. This helped her understand the whole company and its operations, giving her a more strategic approach in her financial decision-making down the road. 

Her last five years at UHG were spent in the company’s venture capital division. That division worked like an incubator, and she got valuable experience working with companies in industries like behavioral health, diabetes, and orthopedics through the full lifecycle, from launch through to a successful exit. 

On a Mission

After a successful exit in the last behavioral health company she was involved in, Krista took a step back for a career self-assessment. She knew she wanted to do some mission-driven work, and that’s when she came across the CFO position at Be The Match, early in 2021. 

One of the professional reasons she chose Be The Match was because she knew she wanted to be an operations-based, strategic CFO. Historically, the CFO position was more transactional,  crunching numbers, but the trend is toward the role focusing on strategy — and that is her role at Be The Match. 

Her experience outside of the realm of finance in fields like operations, product and sales, informs her decision-making in her current role. She feels like that experience prepared her to look at the business as a whole, not just from the financial perspective.

The Finance Department

Be The Match is a well-established company. It has been around for more than 30 years and boasts more than 1,200 employees.

Krista’s department consists of around 50 people, with two-thirds of them focusing on accounting and the other third on financial planning and accounting. They also have a separate division that solely focuses on third-party and government contracts.

Their annual revenue is in the $500 million range. Products and services account for around 80% of that revenue, with 15% coming from government grants, and 5% from their foundation.

Lives Over Profit

The biggest difference for Krista in making the jump from a for-profit world to a not-for-profit one is the fact that maximizing profits isn’t the driving force in the work she and her team do. It is a very metrics-driven organization, something she is proud of. But the metrics are totally different.

They focus on five operating metrics, with the first one being the most important: lives. They look at the number of transplants they facilitated, which translates to the number of lives they have saved. They consider that to be their true north metric.

The second metric they monitor is service. Their products are bone marrow and stem cells, and they monitor their performance in getting those products to the transplant centers in the window of time they have in their request. 

Third is equality. They strive to build as diverse a donor registry as possible, because the more diverse the registry, the more lives they can save. Their work is done on a global scale, and they track the transplants they facilitate by ethnicity to make sure they are moving the needle as much as possible. 

They call their fourth metric thrive. This metric monitors how successful the clinical outcome of each transplant was. In other words, did they send a high-quality product that led to a successful transplant?

The last metric they monitor is called stewardship. In the for-profit world, this metric would be called profit or margin, but in her world, they want to minimize margins. For this metric, they focus on how effectively they are investing back into the company today and in the future, so they can save even more lives. 

Technology and Automation

Krista believes in the importance of using the best technology and automation available in the finance department to ensure things are running as efficiently as possible. Finance and accounting functions have traditionally been very manual labor-intensive, and she wants to automate as many of those functions as possible. It just makes sense to automate manual processes when possible, instead of adding more people. 

The more she can get her team away from manual processes, the more they can focus on strategic planning and initiatives. The goal is to be decision support resources for the senior leadership in the company. 

Finding and Retaining Talent

An operation this size takes a great team, and everyone has been affected by the pandemic and the great resignation. When Krista first came on board, there were some roles to fill and it wasn’t easy. The talent pool is a very tight market. They’ve been able to find the right people, but it was much more difficult and took much longer than it used to. 

Now their focus is on retention. Not just in her finance department, but retaining talent in the entire organization. The company has made intentional investments around employee retention, and it’s more than just compensation and benefits. There are other areas they are looking to improve on that matter to people, like training, development, and career pathing. The pandemic caused a lot of people to take a hard look at their career path and assess where they want to be in the future.

As someone who had a diverse career path herself, she knows how important that assessment can be.

This episode is brought to you by Stampli. The Most Powerful Way to Process & Pay Invoices. Stampli is the only AP Automation software that centers communications on top of the invoice so that accounts payable collaborates better with approvers, vendors, and anyone involved with purchases to quickly resolve issues and questions, resulting in 5x faster approvals.

Want to check out more episodes? Follow our podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcast, or Spotify!