Case Study

PROBLEM

Our client, a privately-held conglomerate with multiple business lines and global reach, engaged DES to lead the search for VP of Finance with the competencies and indicators of potential to ultimately be successors to the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) role. Given the complex accounting, financial reporting and finance transformation needs of our client’s main business verticals, this role was viewed as especially critical at the time of launch.

We targeted leadership candidates to lead a broad team that included professionals in shared services (accounts receivable, accounts payable, treasury, accounting & financial reporting), as well as leading the finance transformation team to implement various important initiatives in the finance function and across the organization.

APPROACH

We focused on identifying senior finance leaders (VP, Finance and CFOs) within forest & forestry products companies, as well as those in agriculture, construction & equipment, consumer products and transportation & logistics, among other sectors.

As the candidate will have direct leadership and oversight of the finance team for a large group of private companies, we collectively agreed that competency was to be prioritized over experience or expertise in any single industry sector.