Accelerating the CPA’s role in the innovation economy: Sattwica Goyal’s Innovation Leadership Accelerator experience

Left to right: Paul Nagpal, president & chief operating officer, the CFO Centre; Sattwica Goyal, CPA, CA, senior director of finance, corporate controller, Compucom; and Carol Wilding, FCPA, FCA, president and chief executive officer, Chartered Professional Accountants of Ontario, celebrate success in CPA Ontario's Innovation Leadership Accelerator program.

CANADA needs all hands on-deck to boost our persistently low productivity forward and drive the innovation that will help build our future prosperity as a country. But with Ontario’s start-ups and scale-ups facing unique challenges, they need chartered professional accountants who can harness their technical skills and ethical mindset to help build the next Canadian global success story.

CPAs like Sattwica Goyal, CPA, CA. After earning a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) and Accounting at Wilfrid Laurier University, Sattwica worked at KPMG in Toronto for six years, which included a two-year secondment in Chile.

Post secondment, she stayed in Chile, and Groupon hired her as their controller for Latin America operations. She spent a year at the e-commerce company’s office in Santiago, Chile before their Latin American business was sold to a private equity company. In 2017, she moved to Uber, where she gained experience in a technology company scale-up that quadrupled its operations. She spent six years in various senior tax and accounting roles that brought her to Brazil, Mexico and back to Toronto. 

“I had reached a moment in my career where I sat back and wondered if I am on the right path to realizing my dream of becoming a global CFO,” says Sattwica. “While my role at Uber was keeping me on track, I realized I wasn’t going to reach the next stage in my career without stepping outside my comfort zone and building my professional community in Canada.”

In 2023, she left Uber to be a freelance consultant working with start-ups to help transform their finance functions leveraging data and systems. She also began working with an executive coach, who told her about the Innovation Leadership Accelerator (ILA).

With its focused curriculum and impressive lineup of speakers, CPA Ontario’s 15-week exclusive program appealed to her desire to develop her Canadian network and deepen her understanding of Canada’s start-up and scale-up landscape. She decided to join her coach and enroll.

Having successfully completed the program, Sattwica can now reflect on an exceptional experience that re-shaped her approach to strategic financial leadership.

“It’s all about strategy when you’re working in at a start-up,” she says. “When you’re laser-focused on solving a problem, convince stakeholders you have the right solution, and get a product or service out the door, it comes down to how you use your resources and communicate decisions and results with clarity.”

The Innovation Leadership Accelerator provided Sattwica with “unfiltered access” to a concentrated network of like-minded CPA peers with diverse professional backgrounds, and leading viewpoints from speakers who provided a “masterclass” on the role of the CPA in Canada’s innovation economy.   

And through ILA’s mentorship pairing program, Sattwica met an experienced chief financial officer in the tech space who is helping to broaden her understanding of technical skills like data application and the ‘soft skills’ needed to make an impact and advance as a CPA leader in Canada’s tech ecosystem.

As Sattwica completed the program, she was offered a senior finance director role at Compucom, a nearly 40-year-old technology services provider recently acquired by private equity “that still faces similar challenges to that of a start-up.” She’s convinced that her exposure to the different leadership perspectives and the community of Ontario CPAs she has tapped into through ILA will help her make an impact at Compucom and accelerate her trajectory as an innovation leader and future CFO.

“The dream I had when I was 20 years old of becoming a CFO hasn’t changed, I’m just refining it,” she continues. “While my path has shifted over time, ILA and my new mentor are equipping me to be more strategic about how I make it happen.”

“People are attracted to start-ups because of the energy and passion  that comes from building  something together from scratch, challenging the status quo, and seeing the result of your innovation that makes you proud to say, ‘I built that’,” says Sattwica. 

“ILA reignited that passion within me, and I would do it again in a heartbeat.”

CPA Ontario's Innovation Leadership Accelerator 2024 cohort celebrate their success.

Are you a CPA working in Ontario who wants to accelerate your leadership role in growing Canada’s innovation economy? Applications are now open for CPA Ontario’s Innovation Leadership Accelerator starting in January 2025. Learn more about our program and apply here.

Tite image: Sattwica Goyal, CPA, CA, and graduate of CPA Ontario's Innovation Leadership Accelerator (ILA). All images courtesy CPA Ontario.