By Glen Korstrom
Chief financial officers (CFOs) play a pivotal role in a corporation’s success, but all too often their efforts are overlooked while the CEO basks in the corporate glory or, alternately, is blamed for poor performance.
With a goal of rectifying the situation, Business in Vancouver launched B.C.’s only CFO of the Year awards program. Winners will be announced at the inaugural BC CFO of the Year awards dinner May 17.
“The goal is to identify CFOs who make significant contributions to the success of their companies,” said Cheryl Carter, vice-president of Business in Vancouver Media Group and a champion of the CFO awards project.
She explained that a good CFO is a strategist with a high level of financial acumen and the ability to tell the company’s story to various audiences. That’s not all, however.
Carter said that strong CFOs must also be able to consider all of the financial factors at a company and form a single, coherent picture of the company’s financial situation. Essentially, that means seeing the big picture but also knowing the details.
BIV is presenting separate awards to CFOs in the following categories:
- public company with more than $50 million in revenue;
- public company with less than $50 million in revenue; and
- private company.
Three finalists have already been announced in each of these categories. Four winners have already been announced in a fourth category – transformation agents:
- Duncan Campbell, Vancouver Coastal Health Authority;
- Sarah Hoffman, Health Care Benefits Trust;
- Terry Krepiakevich, SouthGobi Resources Ltd.; and
- Brian Pettipas, Global Container Terminals Inc.
Judge Peter W. Roberts explained that the transformational category was created because simply acknowledging success based on corporate profit growth at large, small and private companies left out a huge number of CFOs who were doing phenomenal jobs keeping their company from going bankrupt and reorganizing operations to deal with the global economic downturn.
“What about the companies that are in a turnaround situation? They’ve gone through the financial crisis and many nearly went bankrupt. Now they’ve come back,” said Roberts, who is a former CFO at Sierra Wireless and former president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of British Columbia.
Deciding winners from many quality applicants was difficult for the five judges who also included:
- Stirling Mercantile Corp. partner Hugh Notman;
- Lawson Lundell LLP partner Valerie Mann;
- Deloitte managing partner Paul Fletcher; and
- CIBC Commercial Banking vice-president Phil Lehn.
Fletcher praised what he called a “very rich pool of senior financial leaders.”
He said that all of the candidates had to illustrate sensitivity to the roles that they were in and that there are significant differences in the CFOs role depending on whether they are in a small or large, public or private company.
“It was the first year for Business in Vancouver and for the judges to deal with the package requirements but we had enough strong packages to make well-informed decisions about who should be a winner,” Fletcher said.
“All of them had broad community involvement and went beyond their nine-to-five job,” he said.
More than one judge commented that applicants in future years should spend a significant amount of time making sure that their nomination package is as strong as possible by including specific descriptions of how the CFO impacted the financial performance of their company.
The CFO of the Year awards dinner takes place at the Four Seasons Hotel on May 17. BIV subscribers can buy tickets for a discounted $125 each whereas the non-subscriber rate is $149. Corporate branded tables are also available.
Sarah Hoffman3
Terry Krepiakevich3
Duncan Campbell4
Brian Pettipas5
Large public company: finalists
Allan Baydala6
Don Leslie7
John Currie8
private company: finalists
Stephen Mavety8
Zvonko Maretic10
Michael Taylor12
small public company: finalists
Cindy Turner12
Peter Wong14
Sherry Tryssenaar15