CFO Studio | Category Archives: Interviews | Page 3Interviews

Reengineering Accounting

As Seen in CFO Studio Magazine 2015 Q3 Issue and CFO Studio On-Camera Interview

-INTERVIEW BY ANDREW ZEZAS-

Luke McKinnon has spent much of his career in the engineering industry, and since 2009 he has served as executive vice president and CFO of New York City–based consulting firm the Louis Berger Group, which provides architecture, construction management, and economic development services. Though his focus is on finances (previous roles include chief financial officer at AECOM and operations controller at URS, which are both in the same business areas as the Louis Berger Group), he approaches his work like an engineer, building or developing an accounting department to support the operational departments. Mr. McKinnon will be leading the CFO Studio Middle Market CFO Executive Dinner on “Preparing for Private Equity” on Sept. 10, but in the meantime, he sat down with Andrew Zezas, publisher of CFO Studio magazine and host of CFO Studio On-Camera, to discuss how aligning people, processes, and technology can yield broad benefits.

(ANDREW ZEZAS) You were brought in [to the Louis Berger Group] to kind of shake things up. How have you improved the accounting department of the company?

MCKINNON: When I got there, we were touching an invoice 15 times when it would come into Accounts Payable. Vendors would send me bills for every transaction. So we looked at technology where we could have our vendors submit electronically to us, in one bill at the end of the month. We went from approximately 5,000 invoices a month and nine people in the department, to 3,000 invoices a month and three people in the department. Vendors were no longer saying, “Did you get my invoice?” because they could see that they submitted it to us electronically, and it was going through the process.

Tell me about how these improvements benefited operations.

MCKINNON: I’ve got project managers that are sitting all around the world, so if they’ve got an employee that submits an expense report, before, it used to be in Excel format. We went to electronic software. Now, an employee can submit, and it goes to the project manager immediately. It was taking six to eight weeks to get an employee paid, [and now] if he submits his expense report on a Monday, the employee could have payment by Friday. You get an employee who no longer has to worry, “How am I going to pay my credit card?” The other benefit is, now, when those charges go onto a project billed to our client, the accuracy is not six months old, it’s from within the last week or two. They know it’s a timely bill.

In your whole career, you’ve been a guy who’s either been building accounting departments or rebuilding accounting departments. What’s the attraction to you there?

MCKINNON: I like the challenge. Whether it was fixing the AP department or a monthly close, or our timesheet process: You’re making sure it works for everybody, making it more efficient, making it more accurate. I find it exciting, I really do.

Ascending to CEO

As Seen in CFO Studio Magazine Q4 2015 Issue and CFO Studio On-Camera

ASCENDING TO CEO

INTERVIEW BY ANDREW ZEZAS

Irv Rothman, President and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Financial Services Company, in Berkeley Heights, NJ, has spent four decades in the leasing and financial services industry. A former CFO (of AT&T Capital), Mr. Rothman has been involved in virtually every organizational stage, from start-ups to turnarounds, to buying and selling companies. He’s also the author of Out-Executing the Competition, (John Wiley and Sons). Andrew Zezas, Publisher of CFO Studio magazine and host of CFO Studio On-Camera, spoke with him.

(ANDREW ZEZAS) Irv, tell me a little bit about the book. Why did you write it? Who’s going to benefit from it?

IRV ROTHMAN: I have had rather a broad and varied career, and I’ve learned a lot of lessons. I felt that sharing those lessons would be helpful to people with all kinds of aspirations — in their career and life. I am also donating the royalties to a charity called Room to Read, which is an international foundation, founded by former Microsoft executive John Wood, which promotes children’s literacy in disadvantaged countries.

You’ve gone from CFO of one impressive company to CEO for another impressive company. A lot of finance executives aspire to be CEO. How natural is that transition?

ROTHMAN: The CFO today is engaged in the creation of strategy, and in the creation of M&A work to ensure a complementary fit with that strategy. The CFO typically leads a large group of people, so there are many attributes of a CEO that a CFO is able to practice.

So, share with me how your actions differ in those two roles.

ROTHMAN: When you’re the CFO, your job is to essentially to gather all the data, and to tee up the CEO’s decision for him or her. When you’re the CEO, you’ve actually got to make the decision, and you’re not always in command of perfect information. The buck stops with the CFO if there are dramatic inaccuracies or if there’s a bad forecast, but the CEO is the guy who makes the decision.

Explaining Finance

As Seen in CFO Studio Magazine Q1/Q2 2016 Issue and CFO Studio On-Camera Interview

Q&A

Interview by Andrew Zezas

Elizabeth Miller has been Vice President, Finance and Treasurer of Mauser USA since 2005, having previously held a similar position at Russell-Stanley Corp. Mauser USA is privately held and is a leading industrial packaging solutions provider that manufactures steel, plastic, and fiber drums as well as intermediate bulk containers. The company is based in East Brunswick, NJ. Andrew Zezas, Publisher of CFO Studio magazine and host of CFO Studio On-Camera, spoke with Ms. Miller about finance for non-finance managers.

(ANDREW ZEZAS) We know that in any profitable business, financial decisions impact almost every aspect of a company, and educating non-financial managers is a great way to improve decision-making and increase a company’s profitability, so I applaud your efforts. Recently you visited a number of Mauser facilities for the purpose of educating nonfinancial managers on aspects of finance. Who did you present to?

ELIZABETH MILLER: Essentially all of the plant leadership, including the customer service team, other members of the plant manager’s direct team, quality managers, production managers. We also included our sales teams in the presentations.

What drove you to develop the program?

MILLER: We wanted our plant managers to have a better understanding of what the key drivers of our P&L were. We have a great group on the operations team, but within this group we had varying levels of financial expertise, so the plan was to really bring everybody up to the same level.

Talk to me about the main topics of the presentation. You weren’t trying to teach finance per se. You were trying to teach operations people about finance.

MILLER: Correct. It was a very high-level presentation, and we really covered the three main financial statements, talked about the P&L, the balance sheet, and the cash flow. Focus was primarily on the P&L, given that our ultimate goal was to drive profitability. We talked about cost containment, and then also what drives your P&L, and taking a look at the various analyses that our controlling team does each month when we close off a period, and how does that compare to a prior period and what were the differences a result of, and how does it compare to your budget, and what were those differences a result of.

Okay, so truly tying operations and finance together.

MILLER: Correct, and we also covered working capital and how their everyday decisions affect our cash flow. And the last part of a presentation was on the reports that Mauser puts out internally, and we kind of went through them and said, “This is why we send out this report. Here’s what we want you to get out of it. This is what you should be thinking about when you’re reading it,” and just kind of tied everything together.

In the future, what would you do differently?

MILLER: We would probably focus on smaller groups, I would say no more than six, keeping the same functional areas together.