CFO Studio Magazine with David Huber

10 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM 4th QUARTER 2012 to lower health-care costs,” said Marino in the company’s annual report. Calm Outlook When he comes to work each day, Huber watches upticks and plunges in the financial markets. Horizon BCBSNJ, like all insur- ance companies, has to determine how to continue boosting its investment income in a period of historically low interest rates, without taking on too much risk. “We have to fully understand all the risk we are taking and balance out that return,” says Huber. “In my role, people look at me and take cues from me, so if I’m at least outward- ly calm, it helps other people focus on what we can do, instead of focusing on things that are outside of our control.” It is an outlook he has earned through trials that occurred earlier in his career. An accounting student at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA, Huber joined Arthur Ander- sen after graduating college. He worked hard and Andersen kept promoting him. Over his 16 years with the firm, Huber rose to partner. But following the 2001 revelations that energy giant Enron had been sustaining itself through systematic fraud, Andersen’s role as the company’s auditor, and accusations that the company had been complicit in Enron’s malfeasance, proved fatal to the 89-year-old firm. Within months, Andersen went from an organization employing 85,000 people, to a company of several hundred. “That was a pretty big shake-up in my world,” says Huber. In the midst of this turmoil, Huber found opportunity. Bob Pures, the longtime CFO of Horizon BCBSNJ, reached out toHuber, whomhe had known professionally. Horizon BCBSNJ was planning an initial public offer- ing, andHuber seemed a good fit to join the team as vice president of finance, to deal with Wall Street, strengthen the company’s process- es, and build forecasting models to assess the best path forward—all areas in which he had experience fromhis time at Andersen. Huber jumped at the chance, and while ultimately the company didn’t follow through with its plan to go public, Huber’s work impressed Pures and other company leaders. Huber faced another test when the economy tanked in 2008, and suddenly Horizon BCBSNJ, a company that had been steadily growing, began to lag. Working with Pures and the other senior leaders, Huber took steps to reduce costs in the short term while positioning the company for growth in the long term, with positive results. Indi- viduals enrolling in the company’s managed care, pharmacy, and dental products through multiple network systems increased 65,000 in 2011, according to its annual report. “We can point back to that and say, ‘We weathered the storm, we knowwe can do this,’” says Huber. “If you’ve been through it already, you can point back to examples, and people almost always just say, ‘We know the drill.’” Since stepping up to the CFO role, Huber has made a point of conferring with other department heads and senior vice presidents to learn from them areas in which they needed the finance team to focus. He drew on these numerous conversations andmyriad goals and distilled them into three main priorities that would be easy points of reference for each of the 10 departments and 350 employees within the Finance and Administration division. “Now we’re able to articulate at town meetings and leadership meetings and so forth that this is what we stand for, and we’ve crafted common messages around what we aspire to do,” says Huber. He sum- marizes his three points as: Great People, High-Quality Work, and Strategic Business Partner. “If we create this vision, it will bring great people to create consistently high qual- ity work and serve as a strategic business partner to our customers,” he says. Now, with the many uncertainties surrounding the implementation of the PPACA, “there are a lot of people who have been in this industry a lot longer than I have who say, ‘This is the biggest change we’ve ever experienced,’” says Huber. Huber’s steps to understand his company from the foundation up, along with his past experiences, have prepared him for whatever the next quarter, election cycle, or Supreme Court decision may bring. C COVER STORY Lessons Learned D ave Huber’s time working with his prede- cessor, Bob Pures, taught him a number of lessons he applies daily in his work as CFO. One of the biggest points is how to work with the CEO — how to deliver good news or bad news, what to talk about publicly, and how to do all this without stepping on the toes of other senior leaders in the organization. Pures also initiated Huber into Audit and Finance committee meetings. While he was familiar with audit committee meetings from his days at Andersen, he found these higher-level discus- sions with board members to be even more intensive as a financial executive. His prede- cessor showed him the ropes and helped him understand some of the finer points. “[I] had a chance to go to some of these meetings, playing an increasing role over time, watching the dynamics, seeing what kinds of questions come up, when do I answer the ques- tion myself, when do I look to the CEO first — a lot of nuances I picked up,” says Huber. Pures instilled in Huber a wider perspective on the world, teaching him to reach out to Wall Street analysts and other experts to get a broader sense of what is going on in the industry and the economy at large. These lessons have been more important than ever as the political and economic landscape have been shifting under Huber’s feet. But perhaps one of the greatest lessons and one of the largest recent changes Huber has witnessed is in the role of the CFO itself. “Historically, especially in the insurance industry, it had been primarily a scorekeeping kind of a role,” says Huber. “Now we’ve become much more strategic, more forward-thinking in evalu- ating opportunities and determining where we should be making investments.” STEADY IN A STORM