The newly-minted CFO of Lightpath is focused on ensuring the fiber optic company’s finance team is well-prepared to keep growth on track as the industry continues to grow.

The finance team is strong on the operational side of the house, where the focus will be on continuing to “grow and develop the talent we have,” Lightpath CFO Rachel Stack said in an interview. Where the company is looking to expand is on the strategic side, which provides a key opportunity for Stack as a CFO and mentor.

“We have some good folks on the strategic side,” Stack said in an interview. With talent just beginning their careers, as CFO it will be Stack’s job to train those new entrants to “think outside the box and think more strategically.”

The honeymoon period  

Part of the draw of Lightpath for Stack was the company’s approach to talent — Lightpath looks for recent graduates or those at the beginning of their career and then invests the resources required to train them in their processes, she said. Taking the time to understand what those newer entrants into the field need is also crucial for an incoming CFO.    

“I spend time in spreadsheets, I spend time working with my team just to make sure that (I can) explain everything that I've learned in my 20-year career to somebody who graduated college last year,” she said.

Stack took the CFO seat at Lightpath in August, according to a company press release. The sixth-largest digital infrastructure provider in the country, Lightpath is a provider of fiber optic networks for enterprises and is jointly owned by Altice USA — the operator of the Optimum brand — and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners.

Prior to Lightpath, Stack served as the CFO of data center company Cologix for four years. Before Cologix, she served in various executive roles for companies including Zayo Group and RBC Capital Markets, beginning her career as an analyst at Blackrock, according to her LinkedIn profile.

Stack was drawn to the fiber optic provider for several reasons, including its approach to talent, maintaining a work-life balance and the complex challenge of navigating a public company, she said. As an incoming CFO, it’s also important to get a holistic understanding of how the company functions before implementing any widespread changes, she said.

“You go in and you listen,” she said of how to approach a new CFO or executive role effectively. “You have to understand…where the company is, and understand how everything fits before you start moving chairs around and making changes.”

Another thing newly-arrived CFOs should do is “ask questions even if they seem stupid,” Stack said. As an incoming executive, you have a “honeymoon period” where you can view the company’s processes with an outside eye, so it’s “the time to really get the new perspective on how they do things,” she said.

Shifting the CFO perspective

Having a robust understanding of the company’s underpinnings and the finance teams’ strengths and weaknesses is also critical as new technologies like artificial intelligence speak to coming changes in the fiber optic space. Stack is taking the CFO role as the industry is set to double in the next few years, growing from $3.2 billion this year to $6.8 billion by 2029, according to a September report by MarketsAndMarketsInc.

The fiber optics network is “poised to benefit from the hyperscale and the AI revolution,” Stack said.

“AI is going to be a huge accelerator of bandwidth,” she said. “I think right now we're in the early days.”

Lightpath itself has continued to see steady growth. For the quarter ended June 30, Altice reported a 1% year-over-year jump in business services and wholesale revenue to reach approximately $370 million. The jump was “due to higher revenue from our Lightpath business, primarily due to increases in Ethernet and indefeasible right of use contract fee revenue,” the company said in its earnings release.

Ensuring the company continues such growth is a key focus for Stack as she settles into the CFO seat, although the role will require a change in strategy as a CFO compared to her previous position.  

Moving from a private company like Cologix into Lightpath, a subsidiary of a public company, requires a perspective shift, for example, though the two companies — as a data center and digital infrastructure provider, respectively — occupy different spaces in the same ecosystem of digital connectivity.

“When you're a data center, you focus a lot on building where the power exists…so folks sort of come to you,” she said. “If you're a fiber [optic] provider, it's your job to get to those data centers and to really cultivate the ecosystem that lies within those data centers.”

Lightpath also has a broader suite of products to juggle, meaning “there's four or five different sales motions that you have to do,” she said. As a CFO, “really just understanding how the team is working to sell into those customers, and how we're really looking to drive value from each of those products, that is a learning or, in my case, a little bit of a relearning curve,” she said.