From Balance Sheet to Boardroom: The CFO to CEO Evolution with Olga Shevorenkova
Welcome to Season 5, Episode 1 of Better Than We Found It, the go-to podcast for sustainable leadership and purpose-driven business practices.
Today we're joined by Olga Shevorenkova, CEO of Loop Global, a top-five EV charging network in the United States. Olga's career path is remarkable: from a degree in Applied Mathematics in Moscow, through investment banking in clean tech across Europe and New York, to joining the EV space as CFO and helping take a company public through a SPAC during COVID raising close to $600 million in the process. Now she's taken the CEO seat at Loop Global, applying her financial rigour and obsession with talent to build a lean, high-performing team in an industry where many competitors are going bust.
In this episode, we explore:
- How a mathematician from Moscow found her way into clean tech investment banking
- The realities of switching from advisor to operator and what nobody tells you about that jump
- Taking a company public through a SPAC in four months, in the middle of a global pandemic
- Moving from CFO to CEO: the skills that transfer, and the weight that doesn't
- How Olga restructured Loop Global from the ground up replacing most of the team within 12 months
- Why talent, not process, is always the first thing to fix
- The EV industry's most overlooked problem: reliability over innovation
- What it will take to become a top-three EV charging provider in the US
If you're a finance professional curious about making the leap into an operating role, a CFO considering the step up, or a leader navigating a restructure, this episode is packed with real, hard-won insight.
Available on all your usual broadcasting streams:
- Apple - YouTube - Spotify
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