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Unlike the music artists and instructors recruited by School of Rock to provide music lessons at its 270 locations around the globe, John Cappadona was first hired by the firm to provide a crash course in accounting.

\u201cThe day I joined, my controller and I walked through the door together not knowing anything,\u201d explains Cappadona, who stepped into the CFO role at School of Rock shortly after its CEO, Rob Price, moved the music lesson provider\u2019s headquarters to the Boston area.

Says Cappadona: \u201cFor the first couple of months, it took us almost 25 days to close the books\u2014and we needed to shorten that number in order to start making decisions sooner.\u201d

Next, Cappadona set out to enhance the management team\u2019s visibility into the business.

\u201cWe wouldn\u2019t have known that we were going to run into an iceberg until we hit it,\u201d comments Cappadona, who adds that while his team did not come across any icebergs, the company\u2019s sales reporting numbers were just not visible enough.

After making a number of accountant hires, Cappadona says, he became focused on developing School of Rock\u2019s FP&A function to better reveal the performance at its 270 locations\u201449 of which were company-owned. The company\u2019s finance team keeps a close eye on the number of new students as well as School of Rock\u2019s net promoter score.

Still, when it comes to measuring customer behavior, Cappadona believes that as a consequence of the pandemic, School of Rock\u2018s lines of sight into customer behaviors are poised to grow rapidly.

\u201cWe are deriving 100 percent of our revenue right now from something that did not exist 2 months ago. We were an in-person education business. We had to pivot immediately to deliver a remote solution,\u201d says Cappadona, who recorded an episode with CFO Thought Leader in early May 2020.

As it turns out, a customer lesson delivered remotely would appear to be a nice complement to School of Rock\u2019s in-person lessons.

Notes Cappadona: \u201cAt the end of the day, the mission is really the same\u2014and it\u2019s our sense of community that sets us apart.\u201d\xa0\u2013Jack Sweeney

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CFOTL:\xa0Tell us about a finance strategic moment \u2026

Cappadona:\xa0I\u2019ll tell you about my time at WB Mason, where I was really charged with bringing up the FP&A department, with creating it. Previously, they really hadn\u2019t had the sort of financial insights coming forth that they needed. What really comes to mind is Hurricane Sandy, or Superstorm Sandy, which hit the East Coast hard, as you may recall. WB Mason was primarily focused in the Northeast, so pretty much all of our operations were out of business for several days. We had to quickly engage our forecast models, and there were some tough decisions that we had to make. We had to shore up costs because we had bank covenants that we had to maintain, and we had to make sure that given the decreased revenue, our cost structure was going to be fine.

This was one of those strategic moments when we had to look ahead to say, \u201cWell, when are these businesses going to be coming back?\u201d It was very similar to what we\u2019re facing today with the pandemic. Now I\u2019m digging back into my bag of tricks just as I did seven or eight years ago when I was trying to model things out. There was a lot of pressure to do the work and get the answers right. What I\u2019ve found is that you\u2019re never going to have all the answers. You have got to make the decision based on what you know at the time and monitor it. And then if you\u2019ve got to course correct, course correct. That\u2019s the approach that we\u2019ve been using here. If we had waited to get all of our data in to make sure that we knew every answer, we still wouldn\u2019t have a remote offering right now. School of Rock is now remote, and we did that it in 12 days. So if you\u2019re going to fail, fail quickly and move on.