Ann Fong, chief financial officer at women’s fashion brand Z Supply, has some strong advice for her fellow money chiefs: keep up with artificial intelligence.
“If you don’t adopt it as a CFO in your company you will get let behind,” she says.
Fong won the Lifetime Achievement award at the Business Journal’s annual CFO of the Year event, attended by about 630 guests on May 12.
AI and technology can save huge amounts of time to enable quicker decisions, according to Fong.
She adds that competitors can use technology against you in a wide array of super-sensitive areas, including understanding your company’s weaknesses, price and “how they’re going to steal your market share.”
Rising Star to Lifetime
In a sense her awards have come full circle. Fong won the Rising Star CFO of the Year at the Business Journal’s annual event about 11 years ago.
With a laugh, Fong asked the audience whether a lifetime achievement award “isn’t that for old people, who are like really old?”
After graduating from Cal State University, Fullerton, she started as an audit senior at Ernst & Young in 1993 before moving into CFO roles across the apparel, consumer products and tech accessories industries at Paul Frank Industries in Costa Mesa, Trina Turk in Alhambra, Project 7 in Costa Mesa, Incipio Technologies in Irvine and BB Dakota of Costa Mesa, according to Fong’s LinkedIn page.
She moved to Z Supply in 2020, where she works closely with President and co-owner Mandy Fry, overseeing the Costa Mesa-based company and its 130 employees. As for revenue, she says: “We are on track to $200 million.”
The apparel business itself is “probably one of the hardest industries to be in because you have to reinvent yourself every season.”
CFOs Don’t Push an Agenda
Fong says her role is to provide an “unbiased decision.”
“As a CFO you don’t have an agenda,” though she sometimes must deal with unwelcome news.
As her co-workers say: “Before you take it to Ann, have all of your facts in place.”
Fong emphasizes being strategic.
Her method is straightforward, sometimes asking company colleagues: “Can you explain to me, why are we doing this?”
“I just have stayed authentic to myself,” she says. “In the companies that I’m at; I always look at it as if it was my own business.”
