When Ying Miao joined marketing and advertising firm Converge as CFO in May 2024, she stepped into a company with ambitious growth plans and a private equity ownership structure.
In just over a year, she has overseen major operational changes, from moving the company off QuickBooks to implementing new approaches to client profitability and cost management. The result, she says, has been faster closes, sharper decision-making and stronger margins.
Today, her focus is less on pedigree and more on performance. She emphasizes curiosity, adaptability and communication as the traits that make finance teams thrive, especially in fast-changing industries like marketing, where budgets shift quickly and technology reshapes workflows almost overnight.
In this conversation with CFO.com, Miao discusses the wins she’s most proud of, the challenges she’s still tackling and the lessons she’s learned about balancing private equity oversight with strategic decision-making. She also shares how she evaluates talent, what she sees as the biggest opportunities for growth and how she thinks about forecasting in an unpredictable environment.
Ying Miao
CFO, Converge
First CFO Position: 2023
Notable previous employers:
- Semasio
- Anheuser-Busch InBev
- U.S. Department of the Treasury
- Bain & Company
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
ADAM ZAKI: You’ve been in the role for well over a year now. What are some changes you’ve implemented that you consider wins, and what are you still working on?
YING MIAO: One of the first things I did was push us off QuickBooks Desktop. It worked fine in the office but required VPN and remote dialing, which made it almost impossible to use at home. In a hybrid environment, that was a real barrier. I got board approval to move to Sage ERP, and within six months, we made the switch. It wasn’t cheap, but it’s been life-changing — our monthly close is now 10 days faster. That was a big win, not just for me, but for the team, and it showed how well we could work together.
What I wish I’d started earlier is our AI journey. It’s a buzzword that gets thrown around, but it really is changing how agencies work. ChatGPT is great, but not secure for the confidential and personally identifiable information data we handle, so I just approved Microsoft Copilot Pro for everyone. It’s a short-term step that helps with daily tasks like searching for files or summarizing documents.
The bigger, ongoing challenge is working with our CTO to evaluate whether the creative team has the right tools, whether our tech stack supports them and how to build that into the budget. AI is moving so quickly that I wish I’d prioritized it from day one, but like everyone else, we’re learning as we go.
EBITDA has tripled under your leadership — a huge result in your first year. How were you able to make that happen?
I can’t take all the credit. A lot of it came from our new CEO and a very engaged board. They’re hands-on, and that cadence of monthly meetings before moving to quarterly ones made a big difference.
On the finance side, a big part was cost discipline. Not slash-and-burn, but looking carefully at redundancies. There were people doing work that processes or tools could handle more efficiently. We also asked whether we were over-servicing clients. In agencies, it’s easy to fall into the habit of saying yes to everything a client asks for, but we had never really looked at profitability by client. This year we instituted time tracking, which isn’t everyone’s favorite, candidly, but it showed us where hours were being spent unnecessarily. If a client only brings in a certain level of margin, you shouldn’t be spending double the hours on them — it drags down the business overall.
The other piece was technology. We looked at all of our tools — HubSpot, Jira, timesheets, ticketing systems — and implemented tracking to see who was actually using them. At one point, we had a lot of subscriptions for technology that few were touching. Canceling that waste added up quickly.
So it wasn’t one big thing. It was looking across the board, from client servicing to tech usage, and finding efficiency everywhere. That’s what drove the EBITDA growth.
You’re private equity-backed. How do you balance meeting stakeholder demands with leading people, implementing technology and making your own decisions?
I’ll be honest, I still struggle with that at times. It’s a double-edged sword having such an active board. We’re 100% PE-owned, with three members from the firm, two independents, plus our CEO, me and other C-suite members. It’s a good-sized board.
This isn’t my first time working with PE, so I know they’re very financially detail-oriented. They love numbers, and if something can’t be explained in numbers, it tends to get dismissed as fluffy. I often act as a translator between our CEO, creative teams, or CTO and the board. Not everything can be reduced to numbers — cash flow, profitability, growth percentages, yes. But a bigger-picture strategy can’t always be quantified in the same way.
I’ve also worked to level up the PE managers and investment committee in our industry. They’re not marketing experts, and sometimes they’ll ask things like, “Isn’t AI just taking over marketing? Why are people still doing creative?” So part of my role is helping them separate what’s real from what’s hype.
It comes down to trust. By showing results and communicating clearly, they’ve been willing to back our strategy even if they don’t understand every detail. Since I joined, they’ve put more money in, which shows that alignment. A mentor once told me that as CFOs, we’re communicators first and foremost. The numbers matter, but if you can’t communicate them well, they don’t mean much.
Marketing and advertising budgets are often the first to be cut when a company faces trouble. How do you approach forecasting in such an unpredictable environment?
I’d love tips myself because it’s never easy. Clients can be in the middle of a campaign and suddenly say they need to change the budget. They might want to cut print and go all digital, or drop TikTok entirely and pivot somewhere else next month. Things shift quickly.
What I’ve done is twofold. First, I built in more protections contractually. In service industries, the instinct is to say yes to every client request, but we can’t always change course instantly. Now we require 30- or 60-day notice periods. Clients still owe us during that time, and we’ll adjust with them, but they can’t just change or drop a budget overnight. That buffer is critical.
Second, we rely heavily on scenario planning. You can’t set one budget for the year and walk away. We have our book budget, but we also do quarterly reforecasts, and internally we forecast even more often. Sometimes, mid-month, we’ll check where things are headed if a client tweaks spending. I talk directly with account teams and even sit in on client calls myself. It might be more involved than some CFOs prefer, but I want to hear how clients think so I can anticipate changes. That level of engagement helps me prepare.
You’ve been on both sides of the table when it comes to raising funds and M&A. In those processes, what matters more — finance skills or communication and people skills?
That’s something I’ve thought about a lot. Even in boardrooms, I ask myself: ‘Am I more effective showing every detail to prove I know everything and the team is buttoned up, or is it better to focus on the story and communicate the vision?’
For me, it’s always about communication first. The technical skills are essential, but what really matters is chemistry, trust, and even a sense of humor in what are often very serious settings. You can be the biggest expert in the world, but if people don’t understand you, they won’t put their investors’ money behind your vision.
The best approach I’ve found is being confident enough in your expertise that you can explain it to a ten-year-old. That clarity builds trust and chemistry with whoever’s across the table. That’s how you get them to buy in.
You’ve had some prestigious educational exposure — primary school at Hotchkiss, undergrad at Harvard, master’s at Georgetown — and you’ve had roles at some of the most competitive companies in the world. How does that shape the way you evaluate talent, especially when evaluating people who haven’t had those kinds of opportunities?
The biggest lesson for me is never to judge a book by its cover. Titles and schools matter, but not nearly as much as performance. When I hire, I give people 30 to 60 days to ramp up. You can’t expect a superstar on day two. People are different — some are extroverted, some introverted, some settle in quickly, others more slowly. What matters most is hunger to learn and the ability to take things on.
There’s someone on my team named Timothy Hsueh. He doesn’t have an MBA, but his capacity is incredible. I tested him multiple times over the past year and a half, and every time he delivered. So, I promoted him twice in that period. He started as a finance associate and now he’s director of finance, basically our controller, at 28 years old.
That experience shows me that background and education don’t always correlate with performance. Some people look great on paper but don’t deliver. Others are curious, hungry and willing to roll up their sleeves. That’s the quality I value most.
What are the biggest opportunities for growth at Converge, and how does finance play a role in capitalizing on them?
Growth for us is twofold. First, we’re not just a media planning agency. What we do best is performance marketing, especially lead generation. We put our own dollars out there to get customers for clients, and then we sell those customers back to them for a markup. We only win if our clients win. That model is the future. CMOs are under pressure to prove ROI, and they’re working hand in hand with CFOs now. Performance marketing gives them clear results.
Second, data and analytics. The biggest growth opportunity for us is leveraging data better, and of course, using AI to do that. We need to know exactly which sources gave us the best customers, by industry, by channel, by time of day. That’s the engine we’ve been building in-house. Finance works with the CTO and strategy team to design systems, calculate ROI and set budgets for that. That’s where our future lies.
You’re at the prime of your career. What do you think about work-life balance as a CFO and as a mom?
Honestly, it’s a daily struggle. I have a seven-year-old daughter, and if you asked her, she’d say, “Mommy’s always on the computer or on her phone.” She even teases me about my bad neck from looking at screens too much.
The key for me is dedicated time. Not multitasking, but really shutting things off. If I’m with her after school for two hours, that’s her time. I’ll tell my team I can’t respond for those hours. It’s not always frequent enough, but it makes a difference for her.
At the same time, I love my job. I really do. It took me a long time to find that the CFO role, FP&A and the whole finance suite are what make me happy. I read about it, go to conferences, think about it even outside work — it’s not a chore for me. But I also know my best thinking doesn’t come when I’m burned out. It comes when I’ve had downtime and can come back refreshed with new ideas. That balance is still a work in progress, but it’s essential.
