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Mike Agresta, the CFO at Coupa, a Colorado-based AI platform for total spend management, talked to the WSJ Leadership Institute about how his morning routine powers his leadership of Coupa's finance team and sets the tone for success. CFO Council members and potential members, if you have your own tips to share, reply to this email to share your insights.
In this holiday-shortened trading week, there will be no tier-one economic data releases nor any major companies reporting earnings. Read on below for a look at the week ahead.
Meanwhile, here’s a condensed version of our Q&A with Coupa’s CFO.
What is your Monday morning routine?
Agresta: My Mondays are all about calibration and alignment. I start by meticulously reviewing my to-do list and calendar for the week to ensure my time is allocated against our highest priorities. Once I have my own bearings, I shift immediately to the team. We hold a comprehensive team meeting to review learnings from the previous week, handle necessary passdowns, and go "around the horn" to ensure everyone is synchronized. It sets a cadence of transparency and readiness for the days ahead.
Beverage of choice?
Agresta: Coffee. Dunkin’, drip, black. I like to keep it simple and effective.
How do you stay mentally or physically strong for the CFO job?
Agresta: You have to carve out space for yourself and lean heavily on your support system—your family and friends. I often tell people there are three pillars to a successful life and career: be ethical, work hard, and—perhaps most importantly—pick the best partner. Whether that’s a husband or a wife or other, that person is your foundation.
Mentally, it is crucial to ensure your self-worth isn't rooted in the wrong things, like a job title or a stock price. When your foundation at home is strong, you have the resilience to handle the pressures of the office.
What are you most excited about?
Agresta: Professionally: What we can do with AI. We’ve taken an approach to look at the processes that take up time and then use AI to fix that. It’s amazing how quickly inefficiencies become apparent when you have the right people looking at it, and how quickly they can be addressed when you apply AI. We’re doing this in a finance and operations organization— not highly technical, but with genAI and agents, we can transform how we work supported by IT, instead of relying on them. I’m looking at how we can utilize AI to fundamentally transform how we run Coupa as a business; it is the next massive wave in how the world does work.
Personally: Ski season. Living here in Colorado, I consider the Rockies my backyard, and I intend to take full advantage of it this year. It’s the one place where I can totally disconnect—mostly because it’s hard to check email when you’re navigating a tricky run at 12,000 feet. It is the ultimate mental reset.
What is top of mind for you for the remainder of the year?
Agresta: Right now, it is all about execution and landing the plane. We are focused on the planning cycle and ensuring we close out
the fiscal year strictly in line with our forecast. Consistency is key.
Priorities for next year?
Agresta: I have crystallized Coupa’s focus into four main pillars for the upcoming year:
Ownership and Accountability: Ensuring every leader owns their outcomes.
Execution with Perfection: Moving from "good enough" to exceptional.
Talent: Making sure we have the absolute best people in the right seats.
Metrics-Driven Operations: Operating the business consistently based on hard data, not intuition.
What leader do you admire? Why?
Agresta: Too cliché to say Warren Buffett? I admire his approach to noise reduction. In a world of constant digital distraction, he is famous for sitting in a room with no email and no computer, just reading and thinking. He possesses a rare ability to take incredibly complicated financial concepts and make them simple. That clarity of thought—getting exactly to the essence of what you need to know—is exceptional.
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