Reporting to a $150bn parent, and rebuilding real estate.

The situation

Public-company reporting standards, private-company infrastructure.

The finance function ran on an on-premise legacy system and closed the month in more than twenty calendar days. That is survivable for an independent business. It is not survivable when your reporting and board communication run into a $150bn publicly traded parent, whose own calendar does not move to accommodate yours.

The second problem was structural rather than financial. Store development — site selection, design, and the capital deployed through it — had drifted out of alignment with the company's stated growth goals. Money was going into locations under a model that no longer reflected where the business was trying to go.

What I did — finance and accounting

Replace the system, then match the team to the work.

• Led the full implementation of Sage Intacct in under four months, replacing the on-premise system end to end.
• Assessed every team member's skillset and personal development goals and matched them closely against the revised needs of the function — rather than restructuring around an org chart and hoping people fit it.
• Took ownership of reporting and board communication to the publicly traded parent, so the relationship ran through one accountable point rather than several partial ones.
• Rebuilt the close process against the parent company's requirements: from 20+ calendar days to five, in less than a year.

What I did — real estate

Point the capital at the growth plan.

• Redefined the company's strategic growth goals with the CEO, then recruited the right leader to run the new department against them.
• Supervised the team rebuild, revamped the site selection model, and developed a new store design — targeting both higher sales volumes and higher four-wall profitability, not just more locations.
• Built internal guidelines and policies for store maintenance so capital was deployed efficiently, while giving managers visibility into the status of their own requests. Visibility is what stops a queue from generating escalations.
• Implemented a third-party solution to automate the maintenance process, letting one person efficiently manage 50+ locations across three states.

What changed

Ten business days off the close, and a department that matched the plan.

The close shortened by ten business days and the quality of the reporting improved alongside it — the two do not automatically travel together, and getting both required replacing the system rather than compressing the existing process.

The cloud accounting implementation was complete in three months. Store development was rebuilt to meet the company's growth goals, with the maintenance function carrying 50+ locations on a single person's time.