885: Landing Your Career’s “Pivot Position” | Robert Mitchell, CFO, Zepz

Robert Mitchell had been sizing up new venture opportunities for PayPal for roughly 3 years when the door to an operations role swung open. Impressed by his financial modeling know-how, Mitchell tells us, PayPal’s credit bosses “handpicked” him to create a framework for launching and monitoring new credit offerings. For Mitchell, there was no turning back. “They just told me that I was a smart guy and that I could figure things out,” recalls Mitchell, who adds that the fact that the new position was in Brussels didn’t even give him pause. From the start, Mitchell viewed the position as a critical career rung that would allow him to climb above his financial modeling stints. “I was the guy who could whiteboard an idea or financial model, present it, size it, and do anything that you wanted to it,” continues Mitchell, who observes that prior to the Brussels post he had mostly been an “individual contributor” and not someone who empowered teams. “The role really taught me how to think through processes end-to-end and how to launch a program while working with and leading different operational teams,” explains Mitchell, who credits his previous experience with having helped to put in motion a critical career pivot. “When I came back, I was able to serve in a controllership role that would have typically gone to someone with more of a traditional auditing background,” comments Mitchell, who notes that he had “raised his hand” and begun speaking with PayPal’s chief accounting officer about potential positions before arriving back in the States. Moreover, Mitchell tells us that it was roughly at about this time that he began to think about different experience gaps on his CFO resume and the types of roles that could help him to fill them. Says Mitchell: “I had some work ahead of me, but the path was now visible.” –Jack Sweeney