Listen here

Or listen on your favourite streaming platform:

Episode 49: Soldo | With Dynshaw Italia, CFO

Dynshaw Italia, CFO at Soldo, brings 20 years of experience working and developing fast growing consumer brands to navigate change and growth. At Soldo, he is using his ability as an adaptable leader to help their mission of lighting a brighter way for businesses to pay for advertising, software, travel expenses, online procurement, and more. Soldo believes businesses deserve better than painful, slow, and costly spending, and is providing a solution that is smarter, faster, and more connected to build an entirely new financial architecture for them.

When Dynshaw joined Soldo, he brought with him years of experience working in various disciplines and companies of all sizes. He is using that experience as an asset to help drive financial stability and success for the company. He believes that a CFO should never stand still to be successful – need to have a desire to improve and a willingness to adapt to whatever situations come about. A key to that is pushing for more efficiency and encouraging a mindset of betterment towards profitability within the organization. 

Attracted to companies with a common thread of entrepreneurial goals, Dynshaw has brought his strategic agility, desire to continually improve, love of technology, and emphasis on building trust amongst his leadership team and employees to provide a vision and roadmap to continued financial success and growth. 

Dynshaw believes being successful requires a CFO to be involved and understand all areas of the business, serving as a visionary that helps prepare the company for varying competitive environments. He says, “if you fail, fail fast, and move on.” That way, you can quickly define success up front and move on towards improvement. 

In this episode of The CFO Playbook, Dynshaw Italia, CFO at Soldo, shares that trust and accountability is the most important mindset to start with when developing a cohesive, supportive, and successful culture. Flexibility and openness to financial transformations and a willingness to adopt new tools is inherent to improving oneself and the company as a whole.

Take The CFO Playbook Listener Survey to help us improve the show. You’ll also be entered to win your choice of the latest iPad Pro or a Samsung Galaxy S7.

Guest Analysis

Name: Dynshaw Italia

What he does: Dynshaw Italia is CFO at Soldo, an organization that believes businesses deserve better than painful, slow, and costly spending, and is providing a solution that is smarter, faster, and more connected to build an entirely new financial architecture for to pay for advertising, software, travel expenses, online procurement, and more. Dynshaw brings 20 years of experience working and developing fast growing consumer brands to help Soldo be prepared and successful in the face of any change. 

Key Quote:  “I keep saying we should be an enabler, not an obstacle. It’s very, very important. You can never stand still. You have to adapt. You have to change to survive. You have to change to grow. You’ve got to change to be successful. That’s important. And then the culture piece is driven from leadership. So you set the tone as a leader, you set the example, you create the environment and people will follow what you do if you lead by example.”                

Where to find Dynshaw: LinkedIn

From Dynshaw’s Playbook

A CFO’s job is to be a visionary that lays out the risk, benefits, and costs

Dynshaw feels it is his job as CFO to lay out the risks of what a project would entail. It’s important for a team to have collective buy-in to make it work, understanding the risks and still be willing to take that next step. A big lesson he has learned is that you’re not always going to agree with decisions that are made, but you need to ensure they’re done in a fully educated way. As long as everyone is fully informed of all possibilities then Dynshaw thinks you’ll  eventually get the reward for it. 

It is important to always create options and not be stuck with one approach

Success requires flexibility. From yourself, to your leadership, to your support team, you want people around you that are able to accept continuous change and not shy away from responsibilities. There is always constant change in fast growing businesses, so having an adaptable mindset not only helps you to gain experience, but will allow you to succeed.

Trust and accountability is key to creating transparency, provide expectations, and build structures

Building trust with your leadership and your colleagues helps bind everyone together towards a shared vision to build a company. Dynshaw believes that trust helps everything fall into place. Being able to communicate, no matter if it’s when things are going well or going badly is a core element to gaining trust. With that, you need to understand that time is a resource to be respected and provided to others when brainstorming and guiding the strategic direction of a company.

Don’t call it a mistake, call it an experience

Dynshaw thinks, “if you fail, fail fast and move on.” It is okay to try multiple things, just make sure you define what is success. If something is too complicated, shut it down and try the next thing. In an effort to become more efficient, be open to learning from missteps and see them as teaching moments and experiences. Allow yourself to try new things and integrate ideas from others and new technologies to garner improvement. 

Episode Highlights

Being flexible is a key to success

“In a fast-growing business change is a constant because it’s just happening on a daily basis. I use this term, “you adapt or you die.” It’s as simple as that. You have to have the mindset that you can adapt to change. If you can accept change, you can work in a fast-growing environment. Because you’re working in a fast-paced environment, you continuously learn, getting experience.”

Encourage a culture of self-starters

“It comes to mindset and culture. Everything that you do is about how you set up the culture within your teams or within your organization. So you want self-starters. You want people to take responsibility. You want people to accept continuous change. So it starts with the recruitment process. You’re looking for people with the right attitude. You’re looking for people who will take on responsibility and not shy away from it.” 

Don’t get in the way

“I keep saying we should be an enabler, not an obstacle. It’s very, very important. You can never stand still. You have to adapt. You have to change to survive. You have to change to grow. You’ve got to change to be successful. That’s important. And then the culture piece is driven from leadership. So you set the tone as a leader, you set the example, you create the environment and people will follow what you do if you lead by example.”

Lead by example

“A lot is driven by leaders themselves. So what you do is really important, how you operate is really important. You set the example, you set the benchmarks, you show that it’s okay to do something wrong, as long as you don’t do it again. You know, all those sort of things you create. And a lot of it is creating structure. So people know what is expected of them. They know what good looks like, what bad looks like.”

Top quotes:

“It comes to mindset and culture. Everything that you do is about how you set up the culture within your teams or within your organization. So you want self-starters. You want people to take responsibility. You want people to accept continuous change. So it starts with the recruitment process. You’re looking for people with the right attitude. You’re looking for people who will take on responsibility and not shy away from it.” 

“A lot is driven by leaders themselves. So what you do is really important, how you operate is really important. You set the example, you set the benchmarks, you show that it’s okay to do something wrong, as long as you don’t do it again. You know, all those sort of things you create. And a lot of it is creating structure. So people know what is expected of them. They know what good looks like, what bad looks like.”

“In a fast-growing business change is a constant because it’s just happening on a daily basis. I use this term, “you adapt or you die.” It’s as simple as that. You have to have the mindset that you can adapt to change. If you can accept change, you can work in a fast-growing environment. Because you’re working in a fast-paced environment, you continuously learn, getting experience.”

“I keep saying we should be an enabler, not an obstacle. It’s very, very important. You can never stand still. You have to adapt. You have to change to survive. You have to change to grow. You’ve got to change to be successful. That’s important. And then the culture piece is driven from leadership. So you set the tone as a leader, you set the example, you create the environment and people will follow what you do if you lead by example.”