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Last November, CFO Bob Feller achieved a career milestone of sorts when he celebrated his fifth anniversary as Workforce Software\u2019s finance leader.

\u201cPrior to this, the longest that I have ever stayed anywhere has been four years,\u201d explains Feller, who says that the cadence of his CFO career transitions is normally in step with those of other tech sector CFOs, who are known to job-hop every three to four years.

Still, Feller mentions his recent anniversary to draw our attention to his resolve to help build Workforce into a formidable SaaS challenger inside the realm of workforce management software.

\u201cIt reminds me of when I started at Salesforce and we were up against Siebel\u2014which was then acquired by Oracle\u2014and everyone thought that we didn\u2019t have a chance,\u201d says Feller, who held controller and VP of finance roles during a four-year stint at Salesforce. Feller says that Salesforce\u2019s singular focus as a SaaS company allowed it to overstep its merged rivals, who\u2014while many times the size of Salesforce\u2014failed to exploit all of the maturing advantages of the SaaS model.

Feller believes that this rivalry was similar to one that Workforce has today with HR software behemoth Kronos, of Lowell, Massachusetts.

\u201cWith every deal that we close, we pretty much take market share from Kronos,\u201d says Feller, while naming the widely known rival that is roughly 15 times the size of Workforce.

Says Feller: \u201cWe like to say that we\u2019re \u2018Zeus to Kronos\u2019\u2014and if you don\u2019t know your Greek mythology, just search on \u2018Zeus, son of Kronos\u2019 and you will discover just what Zeus ended up doing to Kronos.\u201d Needless to say, there\u2019s a reason that Zeus, and not his father, was known as ruler of the gods.\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney

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CFOTL:\xa0Tell us about your arrival at Workforce and what this career chapter means for you?

Feller:\xa0How has my career evolved? I tend to be a builder and a fixer. I come into situations when some kind of a transformational event either has happened or is about to happen. This obviously goes back to Salesforce, where I had to build a team as we were building the company and prepping for an IPO, and has continued on to Workforce, where the company was founder-led for a number of years. You know, the founder did a great job in building the company, but it was really his first job out of business school. His first job out of business school was being our CEO. This happens all the time. The company did a lot of things well, but on the administration side, there was a lot of work to be done.

When we were acquired by Insight Venture Partners in 2014, I was the first hire that they made. They were looking for an experienced SaaS CFO who really knew how to put together not just a team but also the appropriate SaaS company metrics\u2014the KPIs\u2014and who knew how to work with a private equity firm and build a team to support that. Yes, this took time, but this is part of what I do to transform an organization. It\u2019s not like I come in and aim to replace everybody. There\u2019s a lot of great talent in these companies. It\u2019s really putting them in the right place and in a position to succeed and then making sure that they know what they\u2019re in for when they\u2019re coming out of what the company used to be and going through the transformation into what it\u2019s going to be.

The way we think about community is important. It\u2019s not just our employees\u2014our employee community\u2014 but also the greater communities that we\u2019re part of. We\u2019re a global company. We\u2019re part of the Michigan community. We\u2019re part of the Sydney, Australia, community. We\u2019re part of the London, UK, area community. We try to do a lot to support community activities everywhere.