DocuSign's Mike Dinsdale: Leadership from the CFO Position

Every executive within a company needs to be a leader. That holds especially true for the role of the Chief Financial Officer. I had an opportunity to have a conversation about leadership from the CFO position with Mike Dinsdale of DocuSign that shines a light on a new style of CFO that is emerging in business today – a CFO focused on strategy and corporate development. Dinsdale's focus is as much external as internal for DocuSign, and he is inspiring many of the top CFOs in America to take a fresh look at their role in their organization.

The Chief Financial Officer is defined in so many different ways across organizations today. It is hard to cull up the "typical" responsibilities of this position even when you try to align responsibilities according to the size of the company. Inevitability, the CFO has hands in many roles across the organization, if not all of them, to some degree. The list includes: Human Resources, IT, Accounting, Facilities, Budgeting, Strategic Planning, Business Development, Mergers and Acquisitions, Training, Support, Product Development, and so on. "All of these are the component parts of my departmental functions, but only a small portion is really what I do every day," says Dinsdale.

Dinsdale joined DocuSign when the company was 50 people. Today, the company is 1000 people. Along the way, his focus has always been on corporate development and strategy. Everything else under his tent is accomplished by hiring the right people. I asked Dinsdale about their recent transition to paperless vendor systems. His response was that "my role in that was bringing on a good comptroller that does things like that."

There are rumors about DocuSign going public, and Dinsdale has that experience. I asked him how much of his time is spent on that. "I hired a VP of investor relations," he replied. "Today, we do closings like a public company and practice mock earnings calls. We will be ready to go public if or when that makes sense for the company," says Dinsdale.

When it comes to IT for SaaS companies like DocuSign, you really need to nail it. DocuSign has a long list of applications they use to manage their business, but what I found unusual was their reliance on both NetSuite and Salesforce, among other enterprise systems. Certainly for a global company, systems need to work everywhere and in multiple languages. Most CFOs take the position on standardization across the enterprise; that is not always the case with DocuSign. "We choose products based both on merit and strategy," says Dinsdale. First off, by leveraging components competing enterprise systems, DocuSign gets the best of both breeds and cross-pollinates internal expertise across each. Moreover, DocuSign offers a SaaS service that integrates with those systems – so if DocuSign wants those companies to partner with DocuSign for digital signatures, they need to partner with them for Accounting and CRM. The strategy is I help you, you help me – and it works."

Today's real estate brokerage and Associations of REALTORS® have access to a pretty limited set of accounting and business management solutions. When WAV Group does satisfaction studies on these solutions we hear two things – I don't like what I have now, but switching is too painful. I would expect that many of you will relate to this sentiment as you are reading. Here is Dinsdale's advice – MOVE FORWARD.

He explained his position on moving forward in a variety of lights. First off, people who live in old, antiquated software solutions are not happy people. Everyone wants to work on the best platform, not the oldest. Moreover, when you disrupt your organization with evolution of applications, your organization gets better. Dinsdale says, "Disruption, like change management, becomes an asset of your company and is an accelerator of building a positive culture that grows."

Dinsdale grew up in competitive sailing on Lake Ontario. If you know anything about sailing, it is a great analogy to business. The role of each person on a sailboat is critical to its overall operation. The captain drives the boat and communicates to the trimmers. The trimmers make adjustments to the wind. The bowman manages sail changes. The pit crew manages the lines. The tactician keeps his eyes out of the boat – looking up both sides of the course, understanding what is happening in the immediate vicinity of the boat that impacts performance, and planning ahead for what happens next. For DocuSign, Dinsdale is the tactician, and that makes him a new kind of leader in the CFO position.