What were you looking for professionally when you applied for a role on Crossover?
I worked for a company that grew from $500 million to $6 billion, then we were acquired by Xerox. I spent 20 years there, then spent time with a company that split from Xerox. Now I’m an SVP of Finance at Trilogy (one of Crossover’s clients), focusing on the Order to Cash area.
When I applied through Crossover, I was looking for a challenge to use the broad base of experience I've had in the past. At Xerox, I was the SVP of Finance over mergers and acquisitions for 10 years and then a CFO of a $2B division for 10 years. When I was introduced to Trilogy, it had a lot of different concepts that, as an SVP of Finance, I could really use my background to make a positive impact on the company.
When you look into the details of the systems and methodologies used by Trilogy, they’re not necessary brand new, but they’ve been taken and fine tuned in such an advanced way. At Xerox, I worked with Lean Six Sigma Black Belts. At Trilogy, we’re using many of the same concepts but applying them in much more efficient ways. Everything is dashboard-based here, making it easy to identify blockers, manage staff, give feedback, and analyze productivity.
One great thing about Trilogy (and Crossover) is that we have a really strong engineering DNA, and one of the benefits of is that teams do a good job of documenting playbooks. As a finance person, it’s nice to have a playbook that we’re constantly evaluated against and improving.
What are you learning at Trilogy?
I’m learning more about how we absorb such a high volume of acquisitions. I was in M&A at Xerox for 10 years, and their process allowed them to only acquire a few very large companies a year. Trilogy acquires about 50 a year, so there are significant methodology differences between the two.
On the one hand, at Xerox we would maintain many of the same processes of our acquired companies. At Trilogy, we’re really buying the assets, the intellectual property of the companies and some people. But as far as their financial systems are concerned, we aren’t taking over anything; we’re adding it to our existing machine.
What are your goals for the next few years?
I want to improve the companies we support, grow with the company, and continue to learn. There is really so much to learn here. Because the company is growing so quickly each person needs to grow just to keep up with it.
