As the podcast space continues to grow, it can be challenging for finance leaders to sift through the noise. So far this year, there have been a handful of informative and entertaining podcast appearances by CFOs.
Though the topics discussed range from technology and human capital to career growth, these episodes demonstrate the value of a finance leader being able to share their goals, tell their brand’s story and put their personality on display. In no particular order, here are seven podcasts recorded in 2025 that finance leaders will likely find valuable.
1. Secrets of Rockstar CFOs: From The Hardwood To The C-Suite: Lauren StClair’s CFO Playbook
On March 11, former NerdWallet CFO Lauren StClair appeared on Secrets of Rockstar CFOs, hosted by Jack McCullough and produced by the CFO Leadership Council. In the episode, StClair — who is now CFO of online independent pizzeria ordering platform Slice — shares her journey from a Stanford athlete to finance leader, offering insights into leading NerdWallet’s IPO and the importance of building diverse, high-performing teams.
“You need a mix of people who bring the entrepreneurial spirit, but you also bring the experience of running things at scale or running a public company, understanding what good looks like and understanding how to get there,” StClair said. “The balance of those two makes a difference for the team. It’s also having the right folks around the table and having diversity of experience and diversity of thought.”
2. Bloomberg Talks: Disney CFO Hugh Johnston
Disney continues to deal with political, business and customer sentiment issues and its CFO Hugh Johnston appeared on Bloomberg Talks on Feb. 5 and highlighted how the company is leaning on its streaming business for growth — an area that he says is doing “extremely well” for the company.
“This is a business we invested in pretty heavily a couple of years ago, and what you’re seeing now are the benefits of those investments,” Johnston said. “Our expectation is we will continue to grow [subscribers], we’ll improve margins, we will make more than a billion dollars in that business this year, and next year we are looking at double-digit margins in that business. So, there’s certainly a ton of positive momentum [because] of the great content that’s coming from the studio side of the house both on the television and the movie side of our entertainment business.”
3. The Accounting Podcast: Green Screens and Pink Slips: An IRS Agent’s Layoff
Jeff Johnston, a former IRS revenue agent, candidly shared jarring but not so surprising insight about the inner workings of the IRS. His comments on the antiquated systems, particularly the Integrated Data Retrieval System, highlight one of the main challenges of the job.
“It’s a really hard job to learn only because the systems you have to use within the IRS are [antiquated],” Johnston said. “It’s like going back to an IBM XT. One of the main systems that we use to get taxpayer information is in fact a green screen. It goes to a command line, and you have to know what the commands should be… it’s like learning hieroglyphics, it’s another language.”
4. CFO Weekly: Budget Smarter, Not Harder with CJ Gustafson, CFO at PartsTech
CJ Gustafson, CFO at PartsTech, shares his FP&A approach in detail. In a conversation that took place on Feb. 21, he offers a thoughtful take on common pitfalls companies face during the budgeting process and how CFOs can avoid them by focusing on clarity, communication and strategic alignment.
“There are really small [pitfalls], like forgetting to budget for employee laptop refreshes — I think I’ve forgotten that three out of the last five years—and then there are larger ones like not knowing how to forecast your hosting spend,” Gustafson said. “Is our AWS or GCP bill [linking] to revenue growth or is there some proxy underneath that? A majority of it comes down to getting your hiring right.”
5. The CFO Show: Optimizing Debt for Business Growth
On March 4, Tom Panther, who was then CFO of Corpay and is currently CFO of the National Christian Foundation, talked about the importance of the finance team having a sound understanding of not only the business from an operational perspective, but from a strategic and holistic perspective as well. With this, he says, dealing with macroeconomic factors may be less of a challenge.
“I think it’s critical that a business understands its strategies and what it’s trying to do in respect to [macroeconomic factors]… In the interest rate environment in which we are all operating, some may structure their balance sheet differently than the interest rate environment we had with zero interest rates,” said Panther. “In a business that doesn’t generate a lot of free cash flow and needs to access capital markets, they need to have a strategy around their debt environment and what’s the duration of that debt.”
6. CFO 4.0 Podcast: The Private Equity CFO: Delivering a successful first 100 days as CFO
Richard Sanders, founder and managing partner at Sullivan Street Partners, gave excellent insight on Jan. 21 on how CFOs working under private equity can deal with the unique challenges that come with that particular role.
“As much as we think this is kind of science, in accounting, there’s so much natural judgment and so many different ways of approaching a policy,” said Sanders. “Even if something is being well-managed, you may have a philosophical difference on how you approach it, but often it’s not that—it’s often that something has been mislabeled, there’s been an opportunity missed… Ideally, without damning the predecessor unless it’s particularly warranted, [the CFO] must come forward and just say, ‘I’ve noticed the following things,’ but when you’re coming in you have to give yourself time to learn the business.”
7. Fresh FP&A: How to Build a Scalable Team With AI Agents
Chris Ortega, CEO and fractional CFO at Fresh FP&A, released a full explanatory video on May 8 on how to scale a finance team via AI — with no hiring required. Step-by-step, Ortega uses ChatGPT Plus to help demonstrate how finance leaders can use the tool as an executive assistant. According to Ortega, this is a desire finance leaders showed at events he was attending, and this episode was created to help satisfy that demand.
