878: When the Path Rises to Meet You | Don Bassell, CFO, ARKO Corp. —

As we have been interviewing CFOs from different industries, many finance leaders have told us that they had bracketed the CFO office as their preferred career destination beginning from Day One of their professional lives. Still others have reported that it was only due to the intervention of a determined mentor that they were able to muster the resolve to aim ever higher and ultimately arrive in the C-suite. As it turns out, neither of these profiles depicts the experience of Don Bassell, CFO of ARKO Corp., a Fortune 500 company that is one of the largest operators of convenience stores and wholesalers of fuel in the United States. For Bassell, the CFO office would become “the destination” only after he received a particular job offer when he was in his early 40s. “Something didn’t feel right,” he recalls, reflecting back on the opportunity to fill a senior controller role. Bassell remembers being seated across the table from the CFO, who was trying to sell him by saying, “Don’t you understand? You are going to be preparing all of the materials that will be presented inside the boardroom.” “I said to him, ‘That’s the problem—I want to be inside the boardroom!,’” continues Bassell, “and that’s when everything became crystal clear to me.” However, while Bassell tells us that he was confident that his breadth of experience had left him well suited and qualified for top management, he still was not convinced that the CFO office was the best ultimate destination for him. “I didn’t think that I wanted to be a CFO,” remarks Bassell, who credits his eventual change of heart to a human resources consultant who pointedly cross-examined his hesitation to pursue the role. “She took me through this whole process of listing the different roles that I had had and things that I had done during my career, and she then put me through a series of questions,” explains Bassell, who adds that both he and the consultant ended up almost simultaneously saying the same words: “Okay, it looks like the CFO office it is.” To better reveal the scope of Bassell’s experiences, the consultant had helped him to reformulate his executive resume by using a listing of the different functional roles that he had filled rather than the traditional chronological list—a change that helped even Bassell to better digest the fact that he now had a CFO resume. Says Bassell: “It was a crossroads for me—she really helped me to assess what it was that I wanted to do.” –Jack Sweeney