We recently spoke with Jennifer Smith, who joined the Zayo Europe Advisory Board in March 2023 and has been named to The Tech Capital’s CFO 50 – Class of 2026. With over two decades of financial leadership experience across telecommunications and technology, Jennifer has held Chief Financial Officer roles at Wildstone, where she secured a landmark £350 million refinancing deal and led European expansion into Spain and Germany, and at Dark Cubed, managing finance setup and Series A fundraising. She spent six years at euNetworks in senior leadership roles. Throughout her career, Jennifer has facilitated numerous mergers and acquisitions, capital raisings, and strategic financial planning initiatives.
In our conversation, we asked Jennifer to share her perspective on value creation, investment decision making, and building high performing leadership teams, drawing on her unique experience operating at the intersection of investor and management dynamics.
You’ve sat on both sides of the table, as an investor facing dealmaker and now as a portfolio CFO. What’s something investors consistently underestimate about operating an infrastructure business?
One of the key things that separates management from the board is how momentum in the business can change the trajectory of growth. There’s a lot of focus at board level on strategy and financials, but there’s an element of momentum in the market which relates to brand, and momentum within the business, which relates to people. That’s a key part of the growth mix. It’s what fulfils the growth you put into the spreadsheets.
It’s like a spin class: when you get the wheel turning very quickly, it turns on its own. But getting it turning in the first place takes a lot of effort. That’s the element some board members, particularly those who haven’t been operators, sometimes underestimate. The real difficulty is getting that initial momentum. But once you have brand momentum and internal momentum, where employees believe in the mission and understand the strategy, that keeps the wheel turning even through challenges. That soft element of keeping people aligned and working hard towards the strategy is something the board sometimes underestimates. It’s probably an unusual answer for a CFO, but it’s genuinely important.
In your experience, what separates a good portfolio CFO from one that genuinely creates enterprise value?
There are two things: the first is financial; the second, people-related.
First, a really good private equity CFO needs to understand when to spend. CFOs get a reputation for saying no, but it’s equally important to know when to back investment into growth. In private equity, we’re expected to grow faster than the market and beat expectations every year, and that can’t happen without doing something different. A strong CFO knows when to trust their colleagues, the go-to-market team, the CEO, the strategy, and to lean into investment as much as pulling back using traditional cost-saving initiatives.
Second, I’m deeply invested in shifting the perception of budgeting as a purely financial tool to viewing it as a conversational tool. Budgeting season is the most important time a CFO can drive strategic conversation. If a CFO isn’t using that opportunity to surface concerns she’s heard about strategy mismatches – perhaps between product and go-to-market – that’s when to have those hard conversations as a leadership team. The difference between a good CFO and a great one is someone who understands that the role is to pick up on elements that aren’t quite working and bring them out during budgeting season. A budget only comes to fruition if everyone contributing to it is driving their team towards it, and that requires having hard conversations.
When you join a new portfolio company, what tells you within the first 90 days whether the investment thesis is likely to succeed, or needs to change?
My advice to anyone – not just CFOs – going into a private equity or venture-backed business is to spend time understanding the business during the interview stage. Personal success depends on how well you exercise your own skills, the strength of the team, and market positioning. You should try to pick a business model you already believe in and understand the success factors before taking the role.
That said, within the first 90 days, the main surprises usually relate to people – how the team gels and whether your direct reports align behind the strategy you’re carrying out. It’s important to make key people changes within the first 90 days if necessary; this can really unblock a team that’s been held back from their full potential. You need people around you that you trust and can lean on without micromanaging. So for me, the first 90 days is less about business-market alignment, which should be well understood, and more about team alignment within the broader business dynamics.
Everyone focuses on EBITDA. What’s the metric, or conversation, that boards should spend far more time discussing?
The obvious answer is capital. There’s a direct relationship between EBITDA growth and capital spend, particularly in infrastructure, which is capital intensive. A business achieving 10% EBITDA growth by doubling its capital budget is performing very differently from one achieving the same growth by increasing capital budget by 20%. Understanding capital spend efficiency is extremely important.
The other critical metric is growth compared to market. If the market grows 10% and your business grows 5%, that’s very different from the market growing 3% and your business grows 5%. Understanding market-wide growth metrics and the relationship between EBITDA and capital spend, which connects P&L to cash flow, are both essential. If you join a business that isn’t already measuring these, that’s a low-hanging opportunity to improve reporting and help the board understand what’s needed to reach the next level.
Capital is finite; how do you decide where not to invest?
This is a very tough question, and it’s one of the key areas of improvement in every role I take on. The real risk is a “first past the post” investment strategy: you get a good investment case that meets your hurdles with no real financial reason not to move forward, but it arrives on January 15th, then another on February 20th. By April, you’ve spent your entire capital budget, and then an amazing opportunity comes in September when your budget is gone.
The basics are essential: financial metrics, hurdle rates, and understanding capital spend. But beyond that, you can have multiple attractive business cases where you need to decide whether to invest. The way to manage this is to set strategic direction during the budgeting cycle I mentioned earlier – align the capital envelope to the business strategy.
For an infrastructure business like Zayo Europe, we may decide it’s strategically important to enter certain geographic markets and invest in data centre connectivity. If someone brings me an investment case to enter the North Pole, no matter how good it looks, if it’s not aligned to our strategic direction, I need the wherewithal to say no. It’s important to know when to say no, even to cases that may be attractive, if they’re outside your strategic direction.
Looking back across euNetworks, Wildstone and now Zayo, are there common traits you’ve seen in infrastructure businesses that consistently exceed their investment case?
The answer is taking calculated risks. When I said it’s important to say no to things misaligned with strategy, it’s equally important to say yes to aligned cases and be prepared to take risk. This is the mentality the Finance team brought to Zayo Europe’s recent expansion into Iberia, for example, because we saw the opportunity behind it. That’s a rare thing for a CFO to say, but if we’re expecting to achieve outsized returns for investors and ourselves, we need to do something different than the herd.
Again, this means thinking carefully about strategy and market positioning during the budgeting cycle and strategic reviews. You have to be prepared to pick investments that don’t look like what everyone else is doing – not “me too” investments, but something slightly different. That will feel uncomfortable because it means taking risk on a projection with some uncertainty. But when done well, aligned to strategy and aligned with go-to-market, sales, marketing, operations, and the broader organisation, this type of investment drives outsized returns. You have to get buy-in from every function, then take the risk that’s aligned with your strategic direction.
How has being a woman in predominantly male spaces like infrastructure and finance influenced how you build relationships and make decisions?
That’s definitely a topic most women in the boardroom could discuss at length. It varies from woman to woman, but it’s definitely a different experience being the only woman in the boardroom or executive suite. Your actions are remembered because you have a different profile, which adds pressure. For me, it’s also about wanting to set a good example and pull other women up.
My main advice to both women and men is to lean into your personality traits. Within each gender and across the gender continuum, personality matters as much as gender. For me, one of the most important career lessons was understanding that I get things done through informal discussion and soft power. It’s essentially doing work for others so they’ll do work for you. If you’re asked to do something outside your function and you support the cause, go do it – that person will want to help you in the future. That’s not restricted to being a woman, but I think it’s important to find what works for you.
One simple example: if I walk into a boardroom and slam my fist on the table, that won’t have the same impact as when a tall man does it. Leaning into what feels authentic for you as a woman, with everything else you bring from your personal experience, is a difficult journey for everyone, but it’s really important in finding a leadership style that works.
Did you struggle with finding your authentic leadership style early in your career?
Yes, definitely. I struggled with it for one basic reason: there weren’t a lot of role models to look at. I was often emulating leadership behaviours I saw work for others. Again, that’s not just a gender thing, but it is related to gender. Those behaviours aren’t necessarily perceived the same way depending on the person’s underlying personality.
I’m not someone who bangs my fist on the table. Coming to the realisation that the skills I do have are equally effective when I lean into them was a journey. But it’s a lesson I really value now, and something I try to help others shortcut, so it doesn’t take as long to get there. Being comfortable in your own skin is a really important part of that journey, but it takes time.
What’s been the hardest decision you’ve made as a CFO that ultimately created the most value?
I have two answers: again one financial, two people-related.
The financial one involves an M&A transaction I worked on in a previous role. I’d spent a long time and done tonnes of diligence on it, and we were very invested in acquiring this asset. We submitted our final bid and thought we were in exclusive negotiations when a competitor came in and offered a materially higher price. The CEO called asking if we should match it. I knew personally that if I said yes, he’d back me and we’d probably acquire the business – and it would feel great. But knowing everything about the business, I couldn’t support it financially. The EBITDA dilution and integration risks didn’t justify it. It was really difficult saying no, as it meant putting the longer-term vision over what would have felt good in the moment. I look back with bittersweet pride, but I know it was the right decision.
On the people side, the hardest thing a CFO has to do is make changes to the team. I mentioned this earlier regarding the first 90 days – it’s often necessary but gets neglected because it’s hard. Making changes to people’s roles that may form part of their identity needs to be done very sensitively. But if someone isn’t performing well in a role, giving them an opportunity to find a role that suits them better is what makes everyone better off in the longer term.
If you could change one thing about how infrastructure investors and portfolio management teams work together, what would it be?
I’d like it to be better understood which topics should be discussed at board level versus which ones are more effectively handled by management alone. There’s a difference between “here’s a problem, let’s solve it together” and “here’s a problem we want you to solve, bring us the solution, and we’ll back you.” It’s a subtle nuance, but giving management teams the latitude and trust to solve their own problems is really important for building high-performing leadership teams. I think this works well with my current Board and it makes all the difference.
Having been on the board side, I’d encourage investors to build a team they can trust to answer questions independently, have hard conversations at Exco level, and bring solutions to the board without needing to decide together.
I think the secret sauce of building high-performing teams is when everything is in place, the team gels together, and you have people who trust you and whom you trust. That lifts everyone up in their role. It’s the greatest feeling and makes work a much more enjoyable experience. It really helps the business achieve the hard things that private equity pushes for. Having that element of safety and fun in the team is essential.
