In this episode, Sophie Jackson talks to Aidana Zhakupbekova, CFO at global expense management company Rydoo. They discuss Aidana’s career journey, her move into the start-up and scale-up world, and the unique challenges of being a Chief Financial Officer in a fast-growing company.

Hello, and welcome to Ask a CFO, a podcast series that shines a light on the unique past and explores the personal journeys of those that become Chief Financial Officer.

I'm Sophie Jackson, and in this episode, I'm joined by Aidana Zhakupbekova, CFO at global expense management company, Rydoo.

Aidana's career experience in startup and scale-up organisations has helped to provide her with the tools needed to be a successful CFO. And I'm delighted to explore her career journey and personal growth with you all today.

Thanks for being with us, Aidana, can I ask you, first of all, to introduce yourself to our audience?

Yes, sure. So, my name is Aidana Zhakupbekova. I'm currently CFO at Rydoo, a global expense management company. I've been with the company now for almost two years. Prior to that, for the past eight years, I've been in different startups and scale ups, but I started my career very much in corporate finance across different finance functions, different industries before I moved to scaleups.

Amazing. So, first of all, tell me a little bit about what I like to call your origin story, where you grew up and a little bit about your early years.

Sure, I was born and raised in Kazakhstan. So, I lived there up until I graduated high school. Nothing too crazy, to be honest with you, a normal childhood.

So, I also played the piano, graduated at musical school and then after I graduated, I moved to Budapest. I did my bachelor's there, bachelor's in finance and accounting. Then I moved to Madrid for a year for my master's. Then I moved back to Budapest to work for a couple of years before I moved to the Netherlands 11 years ago now. It's been a while.

Wow, so you've had a really, kind of varied set of early experiences there. But tell me, what inspired you to pursue a career in finance?

To be honest with you, it was two things that I really wanted as a teenager. I was 17 when I moved and when I picked a career, but basically, I wanted two things. I wanted something that would allow me to travel and not be tied to a specific country. So that eliminated most of the professions where you need a specific certificate, like doctors and whatnot, right?

And then I wanted something to make me, well, financially self-sustaining. So yeah, back in the day, to be honest with you, it was kind of straightforward to me. One of my parents worked in banking at the time and I was like, I think this should work for me. Based on what I hear, I think I can do this, I think I can be good at it and it would allow me to travel so that's pretty much how it went.

Amazing. And then what were some of your early experiences like?

Yeah, I actually had a very good first experience. I was a credit analyst in IBM financing. I had a really good experience there. The team was very supportive everybody was really nice, I learned quite a lot and I actually had a very, very good feeling once I finished my traineeship, I worked there for a year.

So, when I came back to work for IBM a couple of years later, after graduating my master's, I was actually quite excited because of that first experience.

And you were very young though. What was that like? It must have been a bit daunting.

No, to be honest with you, somehow it didn't kind of cross my mind. You know, it's like blissful unawareness. How young you actually are, I was 19, but it didn't bother me whatsoever, and to be honest with you, I didn't feel like my teammates treated me in any way that would kind of make me feel subpar compared to them.

Yeah, I think you're correct. I mean, I guess you've mentioned like the, the virtues of youth and the follies there. But I was just with a friend yesterday, we both lived in Japan in our very early twenties, and we were both saying now I'm nearly 40. I wouldn't be able to do it now, I'd be much too nervous and scared. But somehow when you're young, I don't even remember being frightened. So, I think you're very right that there's something beautiful about just going for it when you're young enough to still not have much to lose, right?

Yeah, exactly. It's the same thing of when I moved. Now I'm thinking I was technically underage, I was 17. I moved to a new country, I lived by myself, and I was fine. Never, ever has it crossed my mind, like, am I too young to do this?

And tell me what it was like coming into the tech environment, particularly as a sector, and what you learned from that experience.

Again, I think the overall experience has been quite good for me. So, it was not necessarily that it was tech or it was not tech. It was just pretty much, okay, I have learned something in the first two years of my uni, how can I actually apply it? What is important, what is not important, how can I be supportive of the team and things like that.

So, in that sense, it almost didn't matter that it was tech because the core functions still remained very much finance, credit analysis and whatnot. So, it was good, but I wouldn't say it was very much different just because it was tech.

Okay, I understand. And then tell me a little bit about the journey from there before you moved across into the world of startups.

Yes, so I worked in IBM for, I think, slightly over two years. And then I moved to the Netherlands, so I obviously had to change jobs as well. So, after moving, I worked for Converse for I think just about a year. I pretty much initially got hired for a short-term project because at the time Converse recently got acquired by Nike.

And they were going through the whole transition of putting systems in place, getting onboarded onto SAP, all the fun admin stuff. So, they needed additional support, and that's when I kind of joined. I stayed longer than I anticipated, but that was my first experience in the Netherlands. Now, speaking of industries, of the earlier question you asked about tech, coming on to Converse and Nike was very interesting. Because the product was much different, but also the culture was a lot different.

The people, I think, on average were younger. Even the dress code, so to speak, at work was very different. So that was an interesting thing to see, I really enjoyed that one, but ultimately was still mostly kind of accounting, and I wanted to move out of accounting into more FP&A roles, finance roles.

Because in comparison to credit analysis versus accounting, I knew that I would prefer credit analysis, but I wanted to kind of explore a different department, which I think is also great, especially early in your career you do have those opportunities. Just because you started in a particular function doesn't mean you have to be there until the end of your working life, right?

So, from then I moved to Rockwell Automation, and there I moved into an FP&A role, a senior FP&A analyst role I also spent a couple of years there, it was a good experience. Again, I went back to a more steady environment in terms of the products, you know, it's heavy automation. It's not something that you can directly relate to, which sometimes with companies like Nike, it's easy because you see those shoes and those t-shirts everywhere.

So, the relationship with the product is much better than if you compare that to heavy industries. But after a couple of years there, I pretty much understood that for me personally, the things were moving a bit too slow.

And I guess the beauty of the corporate world is that you have enough resources, you have sufficient amount of people to do the job. But the drawback for me personally is sometimes you're a little bit in a box of this is your job, this is what you're supposed to do and you're kind of not fully expected to stay in your lane all the time, but mostly.

So, I kind of started questioning of, do I want to do finance? Am I ready for this whole journey in the corporate world for the next, I don't know how many years? Will I enjoy the next step within it? And to be honest with you, my answer was no.

So, I started questioning of, do I continue with finance because I was still early on in my career, should I switch to something else? Should I explore other opportunities? And then I pretty much decided that I'm going to try startups and scaleups because I could apply my knowledge base and my skillsets, but be in a more dynamic environment, which is something that I was creating. And in my head, I was like, okay, this is my last shot in finance, if this doesn't work, then I'm going to need to find another career.

Wow, I think you've made a number of very powerful points there. One thing that comes up a lot for me when I speak with financial leaders is this kind of not restlessness, that's the wrong word, but a curiosity and a willingness to try new things.

And you mentioned that stepping across different functions and trying out different things. And a lot of, obviously, when we started this project, most of the CFOs I spoke with had been treasurers because our company specialises in treasurers originally.

But it's been so interesting for me to see that there are threads wherever people started out, whatever their background was, there are threads in not staying in your lane, being a bit nosy and a bit curious about the other parts of the business and having that kind of higher vision, if you like, and that, I think, is what seems to set people apart.

And then tell me a little bit, so you've been drawn into the startup world. How did your time influence your leadership style and career path in your first role?

My first role was Housing Anywhere. So, Housing Anywhere is kind of a mid- to long-term provider of accommodation. And for me, again, going back to the relationship to the product, that was kind of close to my heart, having moved around for years as a student and then as a young professional.

So, I was kind of happy to join and see how that works. But I started as a controller, and as often as it happens in startups, the GNA functions or the ops functions are rarely staffed more of a, we'll figure it out once we hit a certain growth. So that's pretty much when I came in.

I think, if I'm not mistaken, the company raised serious eight point two at the moment. So, the investors were a little bit like, okay, we need some better visibility, we need some clarity, we need somebody to come in and actually provide to us on a regular basis.

But I came in and I started with a lot of cleanup with financial statements for the previous years, just understanding how things work. And again, this is not a structure that's well set up.

Yeah, I can imagine.

Well, my first six to, I think, nine months, it was just that, just digging and digging and digging and trying to understand and map things and clean things up and set up at least some processes to make my life easier, but also to give the stakeholders what they needed. With almost no support, I had one person in finance, but more of an admin in terms of AP and even processing payments manually for the bank, which now thinking about it is crazy. Imagine processing payroll for seventy people one by one?

So, there was a lot of that in the very beginning. But as not necessarily fun as the cleanup was, you do get to know the business very well inside the house. So, in that sense, it helped a lot, and from then on, very quickly, you have to kind of, once you've finished the cleanup, your attention has to go somewhere immediately because it's not like you can just chill and enjoy that.

We were going through another fundraising round. I was starting to get closer to the key stakeholders and kind of understand what are the decisions that they're trying to make, what are the investments the company is going to make. The team grew a little bit aside from your traditional finance.

I had a kind of finance ops, a little bit of legal when it came about, a little bit of HR topics if there was something necessary. One of the things that I see most of the CFOs and startups and scale-ups will tell you is that it's never just finance. Especially early in the days, it's almost like all the G&A functions that don't necessarily belong to sales, marketing or product end up with you. So, something that happened early in my career in startups as well.

Amazing, and then tell me a bit about the progression then into the CFO role and your move to Rydoo.

Yes, so I got my first promotion into a VP role in Housing Anywhere relatively quickly, but there was also no CFO there, pretty much, although the title did not necessarily reflect that, the responsibilities did. So, from then on, I kind of maintained the title, but just moved to a different company.

I briefly spent a couple of months, almost a year, in a consulting firm as a CFO, but went back to tech because I feel like tech is where my heart belongs and also where I operate the best, to be honest. So, I joined Rydoo, now it's almost two years.

Again, initially I was hired to help sell the company because the previous majority stakeholder was at the end of their kind of funding round. So that's when I came in and most of my time was pretty much prepping for that, setting up the business plan, kind of running some “due dil” to make sure that we're ready, and we were, we successfully exited last year, June, so that was the initial plan there.

Now, thankfully, I stayed within the company because to be honest with you, although I looked at it, I was like, I'm not sure if this is a long-term project, given that the company is about to be sold. I really enjoyed the team, the teams that I was managing, but also the leadership team there. I do like the product, it's something that finance teams use very, very often and I liked what we were selling, and I liked what we built. So, I'm very happy that I have stayed and that was possible with the next funding round.

Amazing, and you mentioned the leadership being a big part of the appeal. How would you describe your own leadership style?

My own leadership style, I always laugh because I know that, people are obviously different than also not everybody's cup of tea. I'm quite direct and transparent, which sometimes, depending on who you used to work with, can be a little bit of a shock. But I feel, especially in fast-moving environments, we don't necessarily have time to sugarcoat things.

So, I try to be as direct and transparent as possible, as early on as possible. So that's where we usually start and what I do really enjoy and what I do, and that kind of matches my style as well. There is no ego management, there is no finger pointing, there is none of that in the company, which I absolutely love.

At the end of the day, it's a joint strategy that we're trying to execute and being able to have those conversations very candidly and openly with the exec team is kind of a blessing because otherwise it's hard to make decisions.

It's hard to kind of course correct if something is going wrong. It's hard to take risks if not everybody's on board. So, that to me works really, really well in Rydoo and within my own teams. But another thing that I think a lot of scaleup CFOs will tell you is that they don't have the time, so I really very heavily on my teams. And within that, what's important to me is kind of support them where necessary, where they can't do something or they don't know how to do something, but very much empower them to try. And if there is a little bit of a mistake here and there, I always tell them it's my responsibility, if it's a win, it's their win.

And it works with the majority of the people, I think, and especially now that we also, if and when we hire, I hire not just for the skillset, but for the certain mindset. Because if you, to be honest with you, I don't see this as a plus or minus. You have to know yourself if you're not comfortable with the environment where somebody asks you like, hey, can you have a look, and if you don't know how to do this, you feel too much pressure and you want to bail, probably scaleups are not your place to be.

But I'm very lucky and also very directional in how I hire on having people who are very much of that mindset. So, empowering them and working with them together with a vision that we're trying to execute really, really helps me, to be honest.

Fantastic. And is diversity, equity and inclusion something that you're fostering within your teams? How does that manifest for you as a leader?

It might be a bit of a controversial topic for me personally because I never directly hire for a specific profile. I never hire in the sense that I have to have a woman here or I have to have a person of colour in this position, I have to, have to, have to. I always try to start with what's the skillset that we need and who is the best person for the job.

So, funnily enough, with that very simple approach, I actually looked at it two weeks ago. We're at exactly fifty-fifty of men to women in my team. I have somebody joining next week, and then we're going to be more women than men in my team. So, I guess it balances itself out in terms of how it actually works.

And in terms of ethnicities and whatnot, again, Rydoo, it's a very international company, which is also important for me because having lived in many places, I very much quickly understood that I would probably not be happy, speaking of the Netherlands, in the company where all the employees were Dutch or in Hungary, where all the employees were Hungarians, you know, so that's kind of cool.

Within my teams, we also have, I think, six or seven nationalities and if you think that the team is fifteen people, that's quite the bunch of different cultures and accents, life experiences and I love it.

Yeah, it sounds like a very dynamic, energetic team.

And with a good sense of humour as well, which is, in my opinion, very important in the scaleup world as well, because sometimes things get tough and you have to be able to have a laugh.

I think humour is very underrated as a communication tool, especially in fast-paced, scaleup environments where there's presumably lots of challenges you're overcoming all the time.

No, true, and I know it's not the first thing that comes to people's minds, but it's, I absolutely agree with you, it's necessary.

Absolutely, and it's especially a way I find of diffusing, for example, like when you've got divergent opinions within a team and so on, I think humour often puts great oil on the wheels to get everyone to come back together again, yeah, so I'm glad you mentioned that.

Tell me a little bit, you've been involved in some major acquisitions. What were some of the biggest challenges you faced along the way and how did you overcome them for our audience who might be facing some of those same problems?

I think in terms of acquisitions, there is always that struggle of balancing kind of speed with care, because I'm not the person who would postpone the integration, the earlier you start, I think, the better.

But at the same time, depending on the type of the acquisition, and especially, to give you an example, something that we're going through now, right, the recently acquired Semine, an AP player that would allow us to offer a lot more to our customers in terms of value prop for spend management rather than expense management. And it was very much an investment. So, the goal was not necessarily to kind of optimise the org structure, clean up the P&L and whatnot.

So now that we're going through the transition through the integration, that's exactly the challenge we're facing. How do we move fast enough to realise the gain once and not necessarily just the financial gains, but also the joint talks, the stronger value prop, without disrupting too much of people's jobs and businesses, especially in the first couple of months.

So, I think as long as you try to nail that to the degree that's possible later on, things should be easier. But it's never just, this is a playbook off you go.

And then one of the things that obviously comes up in every chat that I have in every facet of life is the evolution of AI and how it is transforming your function. So one of the things that I find is interesting is not just what we're capable of doing, but how we kind of take our whole team on a journey and how everybody becomes comfortable with this new way of working. Tell me a little bit about your experiences within this space.

Yes, so in a way, we were blessed because our own product built an AI feature called Smart Audit, which we released last year. So, in a way, we got introduced very quickly, but in a very safe way because it was our own product built and how it works and we could play around with it and ask questions to the product team.

I think in a way, it eased a lot of people's minds, not necessarily for all AI purposes, but for at least some of them to be more open to the experience because especially with accounting teams, they are by nature, usually very diligent, very detail-oriented, and as a result, risk-averse.

This is where the challenge was for those teams specifically to kind of start using it, but with Smart Audit, we saw such an uptick in efficiency that it was great. Right now, actually, one of the things we did this week is started the onboarding on Semine, the company we recently acquired.

And that was also very interesting to see how they explain how AI is trained and how our accounting team can train the AI for AP to kind of give them a peace of mind rather than make them scared.

So, I think generally, because of that, we're a lot more comfortable with experimentation but then throughout my teams, and I have quite a couple of them, you see the differences in approach. To give you an example, legal, we also recently started implementing more and more AI into our processes, actually now are potentially reviewing the tools on how to optimise the procurement process, but also the commercial legal, how we can train the agents.

So, I think overall, most of my teams are very, very open to it. I think the challenge also sometimes for us, because everybody's so busy, you need to set up time for the experiment, to dedicate, like, okay, I know this process right now is working, but can I make it better?

Yeah.

It's not a two-hour exercise. And I think this is where we struggled, especially in the beginning of the year when everybody was like, shall we try? Shall we try this? It's like, yes, and then a quarter passes, like, did we try? Well, not really.

It's more that than anything, but what we did is outside of those bigger tools and things like that, we agreed that each team is going to take a process, take one step in that process and see how we can kind of at least play around with that, even if it's just an Excel file optimisation through using AI to kind of help code in a way. If it's just that, I'm happy with that, and then we can move step by step.

I think you make a really good point there, because I guess having the time and the bandwidth to have the space to be curious and to explore is a challenge for everyone that I see working in, particularly in corporate finance at the moment.

And that is to the detriment of the potential, because a lot of these tools are as useful as our kind of appetite to see how they could be applied and be strategically thinking and so on. That's something I worry about, that a lot of people are so in the weeds that it's hard for them to have the bandwidth to get that more overarching vision.

Absolutely. I actually had a similar conversation with my head of accounting recently, because we've been going, obviously, M&A, audits and whatnot. And now that we are kind of at the end of the whole admin hassle, he's like, he literally told me, finally, I will have the time for fun projects.

No, sure, absolutely. Is there anything else you'd like to say about the challenges that AI presents and anything around the emerging tech challenges in finance in general?

Well, listen, I think there is always a challenge of as good as the tools get in terms of detecting and helping. On the flip side, they also get good at faking things, faking, for example, in our case, speaking of expense management and AP, faking expenses, faking invoices. So, it's always that battle of, yes, the good guys and girls are winning but also keep in mind that the flip side can also develop in a way that you would not necessarily want it to.

Yeah, absolutely, and then if we think about the role itself, what do you think of how the role of CFO has evolved? If indeed it has, because I think there are some, some, integral traits that must stay.

No, absolutely, to be very frank, I'm still a young CFO, I would suppose, so I cannot claim to have an oversight of it used to be this way and here we are now, but what I do see, talking to my peers, looking what's on the market, is that I think the role is moving more and more, not just towards kind of oversight, but also foresight.

Yes.

A lot of optimisations, I think, the businesses expect their CFOs to know their own business, to know the market, to know the economies, to help lead the companies, make decisions and whatnot.

And I think especially in fast-growing environments, it's rarely just a CFO role, as I mentioned. It's usually a little bit of ops, a little bit of this, a little bit of that, which is also true for me, for example, but that being said, I enjoy it, I love it, gives me a better understanding. It gives me, to me personally, it's exciting to kind of look at the whole map and see, oh, this is not working.

I'm going to move this around and figure this thing out. And I'm sure I'm not the only one. So, I think in terms of finance purely, it's more division, not more division, but it's equally division as much as visibility on the past. And in terms of the role overall, I would argue that it's rarely just finance and accounting and FP&A nowadays.

Yeah, and that's why I think the FP&A background, at least as some formative chapter, has become so critical for modern CFOs. You mentioned there your peers and coming together with your peers. How important is it for you to be part of a broader community of finance leaders? And in what ways do you kind of engage with your peer group, if indeed you do?

I try to, not as often as I should. I mean to be honest with you, but our investors organise CFO sessions every now and then, which I attend. And I always make time for those because it's very interesting to see most of us are facing similar challenges, kind of some challenges are more important in this company versus the other one and whatnot. But it's rare that a particular CFO has a problem that nobody has ever heard of before.

So, it's so interesting to see the different approaches, how people handle things, how people prioritise what they use, what they learn from failures, which I think is not something that is spoken enough about. We always speak about the wins and how we got there, but maybe in more private conversations, one-on-one after a panel, it's always interesting for me to see, hey, we tried this, didn't work, why didn't it work? Oh, we had a similar experience and whatnot.

So, I think having that opportunity to gain insight on other people's journeys to me, it was very, very interesting and very important. But also, if I'm honest, very comforting, I remember the first event I went into. For a moment, I was like, this was the moment you see comparing to my 19-year-old self. I was like, am I too young to be here?

This is well, their self-awareness kicks in after your 30. But it was also that particular event was quite comforting in a way that I realised that no, but also we are all pretty much facing the same thing. So, in a way, it calmed me down.

And I think especially because of how much kind of turmoil there is in the markets and in kind of geopolitics and so on, we've hosted events for the corporate community for a long time. But in recent years, these smaller peer groups that we host have become more and more popular. And as you well say, that kind of lack of fear in like opening up has led to, for me, I mean, it's just been like an intellectual like gold pot. And I think, that side of things has become ever more important as you're all facing, a dynamic but certainly a challenging environment.

No, absolutely. We do the same in the events that already do host, we host an event called Forge for Finance Professionals, and it's absolutely the same. Of course, there's always a couple of speakers who talk about the topic that is relevant for everybody and then the breakout and panels. And you can really see the discussion in the panels, which is absolutely amazing. And I think kind of a more semi-private setting of like five, six people, the whole topic really sets up kind of a good environment to have that open, candid conversation.

Amazing, and then, if we think about advice for our audience, many of whom are aspiring or maybe your peers, what are some of the main things that you've learned over the course of your career?

Still learning, I guess, as cliche as it potentially sounds, to just stay curious and keep learning and keep reassessing what you know, questioning your own kind of ideas in terms of what the function is, how the company should be run. That always helped me in the progression within my career. But I think in general, it just helps you stay motivated and kind of happy and looking forward to new things within your career.

And then again, I don't think there is anything new here, but priorities, priorities, priorities.

You will never be able to do everything that you plan to do, or if you did, chances are you were not that ambitious with your goals. But that being said, I think sometimes we also get into the nitty gritty and we get stuck in the operational. And then two months later, it's like, why did I spend so much time on this? Yes, it's fine, but it really was not that important to dedicate that much time and energy. So, I think while you're doing things, it's also important to take a step back and think, is this contributing to the key top three things that I needed to do this year, this quarter, and I think that helps.

And then what are some of the tools or resources that you use to help you on that journey? Because it's quite daunting to know how to prioritise things sometimes or to know how we should be lining ourselves up.

To be honest with you, it's not necessarily like a system that I use or a tool that I use, I think, in kind of conversations, but also making sure that I have a bit of time to take a step back.

Yeah.

And in conversations with my peers, with the leadership team, but also with my teams, when we start discussing, oh, this week we're doing this. I try to almost train everybody to question each other, like, but should we be doing this? So that usually helps, but listen, it's not always ideal, right? Sometimes things just come up and it might be not something that you wanted to prioritise, but you have to. So, that's when you have a laugh and then, you know, decide how you're going to proceed, go into execution mode and move on with your life.

Yes, of course. It's been really amazing to speak with you and to hear about your career and congratulations on such, a such a high paced run.

Thanks for having me.

A big thank you to Aidana for taking part in our Ask a CFO series. Please do subscribe and share and stay tuned for the next episode as we continue to share the journeys of current and former CFOs across the world.