The Evolving Role of the CFO: Driving Strategy, Operational Clarity & Scalable Growth w/ Steve De Santis & Dave Ristow

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In this episode of The Pursuit Power Half Hour, Brent sits down with two seasoned CFOs, Steve DeSantis and Dave Ristow, to explore how the role of finance leadership has rapidly expanded across professional services. They discuss how CFOs are now expected to shape strategic direction, unify systems and data, strengthen delivery operations, and build tech stacks that can sustain long-term growth.

Key topics covered include:

How the CFO role has evolved from traditional financial oversight to strategic operator
The challenges of rapid growth and how unified tools (PSA, ERP, BI) restore clarity and control.
How CFOs partner with operations and delivery leaders
Signs it’s time to evolve your tech stack
Advice for CFOs on owning the enterprise tech stack, preparing for AI-enabled operations, and building companies that can scale through multiple stages of investment.

Banoo Behboodi

Vice President, Success Engineering

Banoo Behboodi is a 20+ year software and services leader with extensive experience executing change initiatives with oversight of Customer Success, Professional Services and Delivery and Consulting functions. Banoo’s earlier experiences with AT&T Mobility, Coca-Cola Company and Ernst & Young leading key transformational and compliance projects, provided the foundation needed to be an effective leader and a change agent with a customer first mindset. Banoo is passionate about driving continuous improvement through sharing best practices and empowering resources through technology and analytics to optimize performance and job satisfaction while driving business outcomes.

Brent Trimble

Vice President, Value Engineering

Brent brings more than 15+ year’s of leadership experience in Management Consulting, Strategic Delivery, Marketing services and product development firms to his technology role at Kantata. As the VP of Value Engineering and the Managing Director of Marketing Service & Agency Vertical, he specializes in identifying process improvement potential, business optimization and key health metrics for alignment and orientation.

With deep business understanding through an operator lens - Brent works with Kantata partner firms to refine intrinsic and extrinsic value drivers - giving firm principals the focus required for adoption, mobilization, value realization and ultimately - success.

Prior to joining Kantata, Brent was a client of the platform and held positions at Interpublic Group, Accenture, WPP, and independent marketing consulting firms.