Rudi Scheiber-Kurtz, CEO of Next Stage Solutions is participating in the life sciences Commercialization Assistance Program (NIH-CAP).  The program’s purpose is to support SBIR funded companies to commercialize.  The feedback sessions are by invitation-only and held in three cities nationwide and in Boston on Feb 3rd and 4th.  Boston will have 20 medical device, healthcare, biotech and pharmaceutical companies presenting.  This is Ms. Scheiber-Kurtz’s third year of mentoring early stage life sciences start-ups through this program.  For more information about the program go to www.larta.org

NSS Workshop Series for CEOs and Business Owners

Leadership Skills for the Next Stage of your Company

Date: Tuesday, February 8, 2011   7:30am – 9:30am – Snowdate will be Friday, Feb 11th same time and place

Host: Bridge Bank | 1050 Winter Street | Suite 1000 | Waltham, MA

You have been growing your company significantly and are now contemplating how to take it to the next stage.  What new leadership skills do you need to successfully take the company through this transition? Whether you are contemplating succession planning, market expansion or business process technology to improve productivity, the ultimate success of this next change will depend on your leadership.

This workshop will focus on the complex demands made on CEOs and how to develop the specific and personal leadership skills you need. The goal of the workshop is for you to identify the 3 most important leadership skills you will need and what you might consider as your next steps in your development.

Who Should Attend?

This workshop is exclusively for Presidents, CEOs or Business Owners of a company with $10MM+/- in sales. If you are not a candidate of the above criteria, please forward this email to clients and colleagues who are.

About the Discussion Leader:  Gerry Donnellan, PhD

Gerry Donnellan is president and founder of Big Leap (www.big-leap.com), a consulting company that utilizes innovative approaches in working with family and closely-held businesses. Trained as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst, Gerry has over thirty-five years of professional experience. As an organizational consulting psychologist and family business consultant, he works with families and their businesses as they navigate their way through the ups and downs of owning and running their businesses, all while hoping they all will still want to be together for Thanksgiving dinner.

He is adjunct professor at the International Business School of Brandeis University and has held university faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School and the City University of New York. He was awarded the Certificate in Family Business Advising by the Family Firm Institute (FFI). He is on the faculty of the certificate program and is a frequent presenter at FFI conferences. He was founding director of the Institute for Organizational Consulting Psychology at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology (MSPP), Boston.

He lives in Lexington, Massachusetts.

About the NSS CEO Workshops Series

Next Stage Solutions, Inc (NSS) is a financial consulting firm providing CFO and Controller support to growing businesses on an interim or ongoing basis. Through its extensive network, NSS began offering the workshops in 2010 exclusively to CEOs and presidents of growing companies.  These workshops are interactive in nature and encourage company leaders to explore new ways of tackling the complexities a 21^st century business, to learn from each other and gain new and more effective tools in leading their business to the next stage.

Sponsored by Next Stage Solutions, Inc

Attendance is complimentary, but registration is required. Limited seating and workshops fill up quickly.

Call today 617-449-7728 or send an email info@nextstagesolutions.com to save a space

Laurie Taylor joined the NSS team recently.  He has over 20 years of experience and has worked with multiple start-up as Controller. We are delighted to have him on board.

Most Satisfying: In your CONTROLLER work you have done in the past, what is the most satisfying feedback you got from the CEO?

Nineteen out of twenty client companies have offered me a full time position during the engagement.

Most Inventive: Given that as CONTROLLER we understand the importance of providing our clients with more than just accounting and financial reporting, share with us a project that truly made you a value creator.

I began a two person project to determine why a major bank’s ATM conversion had an out of balance total of $19M after the merger of the two banking systems.   The bank booked a 200k reserve to cover this reconciliation exposure.  I requested a Bank Tiger team to assist my current consulting team and at the end of the project we had completely reconciled the account and were only unable to account for $9k in bank funds.  We also discovered a major systems glitch that was the result of the systems merger and trained the banking staff to recognize the problem and how to correct the system if it occurred again.

Most Positive: CONTROLLER’s have different skill set, yet often we are viewed as one of the same.  Tell us a story where your actions made a powerful positive change and why.

I was assigned a project to take over for a Director of Finance at a specialized moving van company.  I first determined that there was a massive amount of misspending going on and no one was managing the AR accounts.  In 6 weeks we were able to make enough corrections that company was stable enough for sale to a much better funded and staffed regional carrier.  The sale of this business unit saved 250 staff member’s jobs as a result of the merger instead of a company closure due to prior management neglect.

Best Business Book: What should every CEO be reading going forward in this tepid economy?

The Why of Work: How Great Leaders Build Abundant Organizations That Win by
David Ulrich and Wendy Ulrich

Funniest Fact: Tell us something funny about you.

I am crazy about WWII aircraft that have massively supercharged engines that “go fast, stay low, and turn left!” also known as the National Championship Air Races held each fall in Reno, NV.  The only rules are that these planes must have a prop and straight wings.

Mark Ott joined Next Stage Solutions this Spring.  Read on to see what Mark has been up to – he has a great story to tell!

Most Satisfying: In your CFO work you have done in the past, what is the most satisfying feedback you got from the CEO?

The most satisfying feedback I received is when the CEO told me that he knew he could spend a considerable amount of time out of the office (with customers, investors, board members, press, etc.) knowing that everything back at headquarters was being looked after with me looking after things.

Most Inventive: Given that as CFO we understand the importance of providing our clients with more than just accounting and financial reporting, share with us a project that truly made you a value creator.

When we moved a company from California to Massachusetts, I had to build a complete infrastructure pretty much from the ground up.  This included the recruitment/interviewing and engagement/hiring of new corporate attorneys, external auditors, Accounting Manager, Office Manager, and Human Resources Manager as well as establishing new banking relationships and corporate insurance programs.  All of this had to be done in a matter of three months.

Most Positive: CFOs have different skill set, yet often we are viewed as one of the same.  Tell us a story where your actions made a powerful positive change and why.

When I was European Controller for a large networking company, I had eight country controllers reporting to me.  Some of the countries (like the UK and Germany) were larger contributors to the results of the overall operation than others (like Spain and Sweden).  In that environment the controllers for the larger countries tended to be more influential in group decisions and the controllers for the smaller countries would sit back and complain that their needs were always overlooked because of their size.  This ultimately led to a team that did not work very well together and this was reinforced by pre-existing cultural differences.  One of the things I did to turn this around was to solicit ideas from the controllers concerning topics to be covered in an upcoming quarterly staff meeting.  When the time for the meeting came, I appointed the controller who suggested the topic as the leader of the discussion leader and subsequent action items.  This forced the smaller countries to play a much more active role in the group in identifying their issues and forced the larger countries to sit up and listen and help find solutions as they were cast in more of a “follower” role.  Following this pattern in subsequent staff meeting resulted in a much more cohesive pan-European staff.

Best Business Book: What should every CEO be reading going forward in this tepid economy?

“Leadership in the Era of Economic Uncertainty:  The New Rules for Getting the Right Things Done in Difficult Times” by Ram Charan, McGraw-Hill.

Funniest Fact: Tell us something funny about you.

My fraternity brothers used to call me “Howard”, which is my middle name.  They thought that it was an “amusing” middle name, so they thought they could get me going if they kept calling me by that name.  It worked for a while but the nickname stuck throughout college and they will even use it today in those rare occasions when we get together.

Stay tuned for our next team member’s story!

Last month the Wall Street Journal published an article For Rent: Chief Financial Officer by Raymond Flandez, commenting in how more and more firms are outsourcing this high level function of management. For businesses small and large, especially companies that want to grow, the finances do get more complex. He points out that many of these ‘Rent a CFOs’ are also Certified Public Accountants.

I agree wholeheartedly with Flandez’  assessment  that an outsourced interim or part-time CFO is a capital efficient way to access this expertise and an outsourced CFO can be more objective and give a reality check. I also agree that many of the CFOs are indeed CPAs and this is partially due to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX)  that has driven businesses and their CEOs more to the compliance and technical side of finance enforcing the common belief that if you have a controller and an accountant your financial needs are covered.  That may apply to life style companies who do not intend to grow but simply run a sustainable business.

From this juncture, however, is where I begin to differ.  A company with expansion and growth in their forecast, the paradigm has to shift drastically from technical to strategic. In fact, not recognizing the importance of strategic finance and solely relying on your controller’s risk aversion, you may be holding your company back from that growth.  Here is why I think so.

For a fast growing company, the financial spectrum has to be broader and therefore more complex as pointed out by the author of the WSJ article.  You want to consider a broad based and strategic CFO, one that picks up where the CPA or controller leaves off.  The CFO is your business partner and brings a strategic organizational mind set to the discussion and understands the importance of mapping out the corporate strategy into multiple roadmaps.  Given uncertain economic times, this is more important than ever.  Finance for emerging businesses brings a complexity that is more than accounting and number crunching.

The CEO needs to fully understand the financial ramification and bottom line each decision triggers. SOX compliancy has driven us too far towards the tactical aspect of finance forgetting the importance of looking forward, checking your Financial Headlights.  The CFO plays an important role acting as conduit to growth and walking the fine line between the risk-averse controller and the visionary CEO.  Your future CFO needs to have average appetite for risk, not too little and not too much, understand how to translate the corporate strategy and be a true value creator and not a gatekeeper of growth.

Rudi Scheiber-Kurtz, CEO
Next Stage Solutions, Inc.