Chief financial officers and chief revenue officers can, at times, find themselves in seemingly contradictory positions. A CFO’s mandate to balance the books may sometimes be at odds with a CRO’s impulse to invest in new initiatives in the hopes of boosting sales farther down the road.
At California-based dental services software firm Planet DDS, Stephen Fong and Mike Huffaker have been navigating their respective roles as CFO and CRO over the last few years. Fong, an alum of Microsoft, EY and KPMG, joined Planet DDS as finance chief in late 2022, while Huffaker became revenue chief at the start of 2024 after holding two other sales leadership roles at the company.
It’s the first time Fong has held a CFO role. Ditto for Huffaker in the CRO role. They agree that it’s been an advantage in forging their partnership at the company.
“There can be tension between the CFO and the CRO role within an organization,” Huffaker said. “But Stephen and I view it as an opportunity to pressure-test ideas. … Maybe because we’re both first-time in our roles, we don’t come with preconceived notions about that tension or how we should be operating. We really seek to find ways to collaborate and work together.”
As Fong sees it, the most natural area for partnership between the CFO and the CRO is in financial planning and analysis. The pair meet at least monthly, going over things like revenue targets, hiring and headcount. They’ll also go over Huffaker’s ideas for growth.
“It does help that Mike is extremely analytical,” Fong noted, adding that Huffaker’s team has a “very business-owner mindset.” Fong pointed to a recent whitespace analysis that Huffaker’s team did to find opportunities to sell new products and understand what kind of products existing customers are buying. It’s an example of “where analytics plays nicely with the revenue team,” Fong said.
Any disagreements that come up largely have to do with timing, the two executives said. As Huffaker puts it, there might be some sales-related initiatives that “potentially have a longer tail on revenue recognition.” But the two aim for crossover through clear data and reporting, they said. That recently came to fruition in a plan to increase headcount on the account management team, for instance.
“We have a shared taxonomy of how we define things and how we look at things,” Fong said.
Planet DDS’ primary customer base is multi-location dental groups and dental service organizations, or DSOs. Huffaker noted that there have been many roll-ups and investments in the dental space, including from private equity firms. Planet DDS itself is now owned by two private equity entities.
Since Huffaker signed on with the company in 2019, it’s grown from about 60 employees to 370 people today and increased revenue tenfold. Founded in 2003, the company this year crossed the $100 million mark in annual recurring revenue, Fong said. And he expects more growth in the years ahead, albeit perhaps at a slower rate than in the past.
Wherever the company goes in the future, Fong and Huffaker said they aim to move forward in lockstep.
“We have very frank conversations about how things are going and where to invest. I think it tends to make some of the decision-making and progress really smooth,” Fong said.
As Huffaker puts it: “The way I think about it is alignment, accountability, and autonomy in how we work together, leading the financial side of things.”
