This story originally appeared on Forbes.com Back in August 2022, when Cardinal Health, Inc.’s finance chief, Jason Hollar, succeeded CEO Mike Kaufmann as the healthcare giant’s top executive, among the immediate challenges facing new CEO Hollar was filling the company’s CFO vacancy. At the time, an activist investor with an eye toward management change had put in motion a strategic review of the company’s businesses, and certain members of the analyst community were speculating that the former CFO’s tenure at the top might be short-lived. Fast-forward to March 2024, as shares of Cardinal Heal ..read more

This article first appeared on Forbes.com Speed to market has always been critical in the life sciences industry. Companies that bring products to market quickly and efficiently are better positioned to succeed and improve patient outcomes. Or so the industry wisdom goes. For Moderna, the covid wunderkind that captured almost $40 billion in sales over the course of a couple of years – it’s go-to -market feat was perhaps even more impressive given the brevity of its existing resume. “If you just kind of play back the last five years pre COVID Moderna was a research company, no commercial ..read more

As California’s 2023 almond harvesting season nears its end, the management of Monte Vista Farming Company has begun to turn its attention from the almond producer’s seasonal flow of “almonds in” and “almonds out” to people and operations. “After what we pay our growers for the almonds, our number one cost becomes labor,” explains Mark Lampe, who joined Monte Vista as CFO back in late 2021, just after the company had opted to convert roughly 100 contract laborers to full-time employees. “I was a little nervous about how many people would ultimately come over as full-time employees, but to Mont ..read more

Among family-owned restaurants groups, Hofman Hospitality Group (HHG) weathered the pandemic better than most. As it turned out, though, the 75-year-old company found itself obligated to evolve with the times, adding food trucks and ghost kitchens (detached kitchens serving pickup and delivery only)—not to mention a chief financial officer. And just who the southern California family enclave hired as its CFO perhaps says just as much about HHG as it does about its finance chief himself. “At this point, I was out of the restaurant industry,” recalls Chistopher Crawley, who had begun a stint in ..read more

For corporate finance executives, few professional experiences are as adeptly converted into social currency as those manifested inside the realm of mergers and acquisitions (M&A). It seems that regardless of whether a finance executive has been involved in one deal or 40, they are usually able to quickly share a takeaway or two. For finance leader Natalie Laackman, the latter would be the case—or, rather, the latter times two, as she estimates that she has been involved in 75 to 100 such transactions. Thus, perhaps it goes without saying that when we had the opportunity to sit down last ..read more

Back in 2020, the call that longtime General Electric veteran Ana Chadwick accepted from a recruiter would prove to be the one solicitation in a career’s worth of such outreaches that would ultimately result in an executive search fee. Still, while Chadwick would be a prize placement for any headhunter, it is clear that this career segue for her would represent something significantly substantive both for the company that she would be joining and the one that she would be leaving behind. “I knew that my time was getting close, so when the phone rang and it was a public company CFO position, I ..read more

This article was originally published on Forbes.com When it comes time for Harmit Singh to brief Levi Strauss & Co.’s management team regarding the latest performance results, Levi’s CFO will often share a briefing document that features a front page bearing the heading “What’s Working and What’s Not.” “It’s more difficult to understand what’s not working, and it’s the ‘What’s not’ that helps us to determine the areas on which we have to focus to take the business to the next level,” explains Singh, who notes that the “front page” is carefully rendered by Levi’s Financi ..read more

This article was originally published on Forbes.com Back in 2015, after nearly two decades of diligent career-building across United Technologies, Paul Lundstrom fixed his career builder’s gaze upon the span of companies known as the Fortune 500. Flex CFO Paul Lundstrom Like many seasoned finance executives who spend the balance of their careers inside large enterprise companies, Lundstrom had to confront the obvious truth that for every company, the CFO office has but one occupant. By all accounts, a Fortune 500 company was a worthy target for Lundstrom’s CFO ambition ..read more

This article was originally published on Forbes.com When the door to the CFO office at tech-security company SonicWall swung open for Ravi Chopra, there was a chair, a desk, and over $100 million in customer revenue. What was missing, however, were fully-staffed human resources and finance departments. So it goes inside the world of spin-offs and carve-outs, where newly divested organizations frequently lose some of their internal “plumbing” – talent, processes and infrastructure – in the split from their former parent compa ..read more

DOWNLOAD REPORT Exclusive Findings: Ninety-five percent (95%) of tech and media firms report better decision-making process after running AI-supported ERP. Sixty-three percent (63%) of tech and media firms are considered AI All-In or AI Intense as they develop more AI products, buy AI assets, and hire AI experts in droves. These are among the key ..read more