By Samarpita Bawal
Capital does not fail loudly. It withdraws quietly—through delayed funding rounds, shrinking margins, stalled hiring plans, and spreadsheets that no longer balance optimism with reality.
For chief financial officers, these moments are not abstractions. They are inflection points—where belief meets constraint, and where decisions made under pressure determine whether a company scales, stalls, or disappears altogether.
At The American Bazaar’s Leadership @ Inflection Points conference in Vienna, Virginia, two CFOs from vastly different sectors offered a rare, candid look at what it takes to operate at those edges. George Skaros, CFO of Extreme Steel Inc., and Simona King, CFO of Aurora Health, do not share industries, geographies, or career paths. What they do share is a deep familiarity with uncertainty—and the responsibility of stewarding capital when the stakes are highest.
Their conversation revealed a CFO role far removed from stereotypes of back-office accounting. Instead, it is a role defined by storytelling, judgment, timing, and people—by knowing when to fuel momentum and when to slow it, when to support ambition and when to challenge it.
Inflection points often begin outside the balance sheet
For Skaros, inflection points rarely emerge from neat internal planning cycles. More often, they are triggered by forces beyond a company’s control.
“Oftentimes, it was an external factor that led to an internal inflection point,” he said, pointing to events like political upheaval, COVID, and economic downturns that reshape markets overnight.
Early in his career, Skaros experienced this firsthand. The bank he worked for was acquired, and he was offered the chance to relocate to New York and continue along the same trajectory. On paper, the opportunity made sense. In practice, it forced a reckoning.
“I really didn’t like what I was doing,” he said.
That realization became a pivot. Rather than continuing down a purely technical accounting path, Skaros moved into financial planning and analysis—FP&A—where finance becomes interpretation rather than record-keeping.
“FP&A is really storytelling,” he said. “And that’s such an important part of the role.”
In his view, CFOs are translators. They turn financial data into narratives that internal leaders, investors, lenders, and partners can understand and act upon. The numbers themselves matter, but what ultimately shapes decisions is the story those numbers tell—about risk, trajectory, and credibility.
That skill, he said, becomes essential when capital is scarce and confidence must be earned.
When capital markets turn cold
If Skaros’ experience highlights adaptability across industries, Simona King’s career underscores how unforgiving capital markets can be—especially in sectors built on long timelines and scientific risk.
Over more than two decades in pharma and biotech, King has consistently worked at the frontier: cell therapy, gene therapy, and now medical cannabis. Each transition came with promise—and profound uncertainty.
“What’s shaped my career has been taking the business first and then finance,” she said. “Finance touches every aspect of the business.”
That approach served her well in large pharmaceutical companies with deep balance sheets. But it was tested when she moved into smaller biotech firms, where access to capital could evaporate quickly and without warning.
READ: When the story breaks: Inside a CMO conversation on data, trust, and inflection points (December 19, 2025)
Raising money, she learned, is as much about timing and sentiment as it is about science.
In one case, King joined a private cell-therapy company preparing to go public when patient deaths halted clinical trials. Investor confidence collapsed. Capital vanished. The company was forced to restructure and sell.
In another, she entered a public gene-therapy company with a strong valuation and ample cash—until trials slowed and the market turned. The stock declined sharply. A follow-on raise that once seemed routine became nearly impossible.
The lesson, she said, was painful but clear: “Raise the cash when you can.”
When capital dries up, the CFO’s role shifts from growth to survival. Scenario planning replaces expansion. Every dollar must be stretched. Every investment decision becomes existential.
“How do you take the existing cash you have and stretch it as far as you can?” King asked.
For many biotech companies over the past few years, she noted, that question has defined whether they endured—or disappeared.
From accounting to strategy: The CFO as business partner
Both Skaros and King emphasized that the modern CFO is no longer defined by technical mastery alone.
“There are a lot of people who are very, very good at the technical side,” Skaros said. “But the most effective CFOs combine that with people skills.”
Delivering hard truths—about budgets, headcount, or strategy—requires empathy, consensus-building, and credibility. And credibility, both panelists argued, comes from data.
When CFOs challenge a preferred direction, they are rarely relying on instinct. They come armed with analysis, historical trends, and market signals. The goal is not to shut down ambition, but to anchor it in reality.
King framed this as a delicate balance. The fastest way for a CFO to lose influence, she warned, is to become “the bad cop.”
“As a finance person, the worst thing you can come across is the bad cop,” she said.
Instead, influence comes from collaboration—understanding the business context, the pressures leaders face, and the tradeoffs involved—while keeping the shared objective front and center: building a successful company.
That balance becomes even more complex across cultures. In her current role at a Canadian-based company with global operations, King and her CEO are the only Americans on the executive team.
“I was brought in to be more direct,” she said, “but I’ve had to be careful when I wear that hat versus being more collaborative.”
Sometimes, she added, it takes extra effort to bring people along—but that effort is essential.
Data centers and a company in constant transition
Skaros’ current role at Extreme Steel places him at the center of one of the region’s most visible growth engines: data center construction in Northern Virginia.
The company, which had never built a data center before 2021, now derives roughly 75 percent of its portfolio from data center projects. Its backlog has tripled in the past year. Revenue has grown rapidly.
“It’s been a constant inflection point,” Skaros said. “We’re literally in it.”
The surge reflects structural forces: proximity to major population centers, existing infrastructure, and a self-reinforcing concentration of digital assets. From Extreme Steel’s vantage point, demand remains “insatiable.”
But Skaros was careful not to frame the boom as risk-free. Constraints are emerging—notably around labor and electricity.
“There might not be enough power to service what we’re talking about,” he said.
That reality, he suggested, could force a fundamental shift in how and where data centers are built. Even in periods of extraordinary growth, CFOs must plan for limits.
The invisible work of scaling: People and process
When audience members asked about the hardest challenges in rapid scaling—outside of funding—both CFOs pointed to areas that often receive too little attention.
For Skaros, the answer was people.
Change is disruptive, particularly in middle-market companies where employees may have worked the same way for decades. New systems, new expectations, and new reporting structures can prompt resistance—or attrition.
“It doesn’t do anybody any good to be in the wrong chair for too long,” he said.
For King, the challenge was infrastructure. Fast-growing companies often bolt systems together as they expand, creating manual processes, errors, and burnout.
Eventually, leaders must “rip off the Band-Aid”—investing in ERP systems, controls, automation, and process discipline.
“It’s painful,” she said, “but if you don’t do it, everyone suffers.”
Employees leave. Errors multiply. Growth stalls. Investing in what she called “the boring stuff” is often the difference between scaling sustainably and breaking under strain.
Culture is not a slogan
As the discussion turned to culture, both CFOs rejected the idea that it is a soft or secondary concern.
For King, culture means alignment around goals—and empowerment. She works to develop leaders across the organization, encouraging team members to take ownership rather than waiting for direction.
“You’re CFOs of your own area,” she tells them.
That empowerment, she said, strengthens decision-making and reduces dependency on any one executive.
Remote work adds complexity. While her company operates remotely, King believes leaders must intentionally create moments of connection. Culture, she argued, is harder to build without shared experience.
Skaros agreed, noting that culture is easy to talk about and hard to execute. It requires consistency from leadership and visible alignment between words and actions.
“If your team sees you living by your mission, vision, and values,” he said, “that’s when culture cascades.”
A role defined by judgment
By the end of the session, one conclusion was clear: CFOs are not simply stewards of capital. They are stewards of judgment.
They operate where optimism meets constraint, where growth ambitions meet market realities, and where numbers must be translated into decisions that affect people’s livelihoods.
For Skaros, that responsibility centers on “maximizing stakeholder returns”—not just for shareholders, but for employees, partners, customers, and communities.
For King, it is guided by risk-taking, goal orientation, and people—anchored by a belief that finance exists to serve the business, not constrain it unnecessarily.
Together, their perspectives offered a rare look into the CFO’s true mandate at moments of inflection: to provide oxygen when growth is possible, restraint when it is not, and clarity when uncertainty threatens to overwhelm both.
At a time when capital is no longer cheap and growth no longer guaranteed, that role has never been more central—or more consequential.