​Candidate for: Grand Vice Archon – Finance

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Education

Sonoma State University, B.S. in accounting and B.A. in economics​

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Academic Honors

​Graduated Cum Laude and with distinction

Beta Gamma Sigma, International Business Honor Society

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Number of Volunteer Years: 8

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Phi Sigma Sigma Awards​

• Fraternity Service Award – 5 years

• Committee Chairman Dangle

• Certificate of Appreciation

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Other Awards

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Phi Sigma Sigma Staff and Volunteer Experience

Past:

• Ritual Committee – Chairman

• Chapter Key Advisor – Delta Gamma Chapter at San Francisco

       State University

• Chapter Financial Advisor – Delta Gamma Chapter at San Francisco

       State University

• Chapter Financial Advisor – Iota Omicron Chapter at Capital University

• Chapter Financial Advisor – Iota Xi Chapter at Sonoma State University

• Chapter Financial Advisor – Delta Eta Chapter at the University of Delaware

• Chapter Excellence Specialist

• Finance Committee – Member

• Programs Committee – Member

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Outside Volunteer Service

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Describe the blend of personality, skills and life experiences that you would contribute to Supreme Council and the mission of Phi Sigma Sigma. You may draw from multiple experiences whether it be professional experiences or from volunteer roles.

I would describe my personality as “full throttle.” When I’m invested in something I put my focus there. But I also know that the “how” you do something makes a difference and that has come through executive coaching that I’ve been fortunate enough to get which has been an accelerator to my career. One of the biggest learnings that can apply here is that in any role "questions are your best tool" and I’d employ that in my board service.

 

I also bring a different membership lens than the bulk of our membership and that I was initiated as an alumnae member, and I’ve found that to be a rich and fulfilling experience even with our current framework. I’d like to use that lens to explore other options for revenue streams and how to enrich the alumnae experience.

 

The last thing that I wanted to highlight is my 15+ years of experience in working in a large corporate finance environment which has taught me to be strategic in all of my decisions, and how the decisions we make connect us into shareholder value.

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​What is your experience in business/organizational management, such as risk management or policy preparation?

As the finance lead for NAA, and a member of the team for the last decade I’ve had increasing responsibility in our ever-changing landscape. We’ve done at least 5 reorganization of the sales team that I support, and we’ve gone from early innings in the SaaS journeys, to a more mature business. Early days as an individual contributor my job was to take action and implement the strategies that have come down to me and now my job is to work through options for those strategies, present them to executive leaders, guide them through the decision process and lead the joint finance/operations team through the execution of those strategies.

 

Also, part of my responsibilities now include being a member of our global applications team representing the region I lead which a global team made up of senior leaders that have my role but for other regions. There we get together to drive consistent strategy across the globe, and also review policy proposals for approval and implementation plans.

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What do you feel is the greatest risk to the Fraternal industry over the next biennium? 

In today’s higher education landscape Greek life is big business and there are levels at which each organization plays from a financial, brand, and political power perspective. In order to solidify our perpetuity as an organization we need to solidify what our north star goals are and be deliberate how we connect the entirety of the membership into understanding, adopting and driving those priorities.

 

We have to evolve into an organization that can be agile and move quick as the world evolves around. With the post-Covid environment that has seen FSL shrink across the board we have to come up with new approaches to sustain our operating base and set up for when we see this back turn around. We saw a trend like this in the 1970’s where membership dipped, and now how can we be ready for a different outcome when it ultimately rebounds. We should look to be on the cutting edge of tools and thought leadership to put us in a solid position to make this happen. We are also in a place where people are still starving for human connection with companies not fully moving people back into offices (and people wanting to work remote) that we could be capitalizing on with a strong alumnae strategy.

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Tell us about a time you had to lead a team or organization through a crisis, making difficult strategic decisions. Please share the processes you use.

I’ve been lucky enough that I haven’t had to manage through a “crisis,” but I have had to manage through multiple iterations of organizational change in a corporate setting, and that can feel like a crisis of sorts, so for this questions I’m going to take that POV.

 

The first thing that we have to do is look at where we are, how we got here and then decide what are options for doing something about it. Often times in a corporate environment these re-orgs are results of tops down decisions that have a disconnect from an operational plan to get there. This is where the “crisis” feel comes in along with the fact they need to be actioned on an express timeline. Once you have your north star aligned to, you come up with a set of scenarios to attack the problem and evaluate that within a P&L on how it impacts both margin and revenue. The final layer in all of this is the people layer. When you do any type of large organizational change you need to be connecting your remaining org into the mission and the vision, and you need to do it on a repetitive way.

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Describe your experience working with budgetary oversight, including profit and loss statements, financial statements and budgets.

I have 15 years of experience here working with financial statements. My day to day job responsibilities today include managing a team that runs an 800m annual operating budget, but also overseeing how to transform and improve forecast accuracy from one quarter to another. Part of this work includes working with senior sales leaders to help them interpret and drive topline growth from the results of their P&L’s.

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What are your current personal and professional priorities? Describe your current bandwidth and how you plan to incorporate your commitment as a member of Supreme Council to your current obligations.

Personal Priorities include being a good Cat Mom to the four fur kids that my husband and I have, focusing on my health, both physical and mental through exercise, mindful breaks, and doing things that fill my cup. Those things include, spending time with friends, cooking a good meal, date nights, reading for joy and turning our builder grade home into the home of my dreams through DIY!

 

Professional priorities: This is a big year for me in my career, with the path to move from Director to Senior Director and have formally taken on the lead roll running the North America Applications business overseeing the whole org along with HR responsibilities for a team of 9. I’ll continue to be pouring in here because my professional priorities are top of mind for me to hit my ultimate goal of corporate finance VP by 40 (which I’m on pace to do right now)

 

As for carving time out for this role, the bulk of my time lift would come out of my weekend mornings. Having only fur-kids (and only ever going to have fur-kids) gives me a lot of flexibility on my weekends.

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Describe your previous experience creating and implementing financial strategies for organizations.

One of the things that I love most about my job as the finance leader for North America Applications is that as a finance leader you get to drive strategy through every line on the P&L. My job involves leading the cross functional (Finance, HR, Operations and business leaders) in our annual planning cycle where we look at where we need to go (north star) and what levers we think we can pull to get there. We then scenario model the different items and do iterative reviews with senior leaders along the decision making progress to pulse check how we are progressing. One of the pitfalls of operational planning is having it get to far down a path before you bring leadership in. How I can see this playing out with in the Fraternity, is to have a finance committee formulating the strategy, but have ongoing check ins with the rest of SC as it is evolving to ensure that SC is bought into the ultimate action plan.

 

​Describe a personal or professional situation (outside of Phi Sigma Sigma) where you needed to make difficult financial decisions to balance the needs of multiple stakeholders.

Two years ago, Oracle announced long range goals, 65B in revenue and 45% margin. While the region that I run is only part of this, we are a margin accelerator business which means I must have difficult conversations with sales leaders as to what can fit into our expense envelop in terms of resourcing. In our rolling forecasting framework that we work in, we are constantly revieing and evaluating our choices. One of the harder parts of the job is explaining to senior leaders (SVP’s & GVP’s) that the resourcing plan that we had previously approved for their area’s are no longer viable because one of their peers have not hit top line targets.  One Of the hardest things to do is tell a senior leader that the headcount plan you’ve previously agreed on is no longer a viable plan for other reasons. You then also must help them think through how you balance the work, because most of the time, these conversations come with the flip side of the coin that the work doesn’t stop. So then you focus on automation, or changing how you get to the same business result.

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Describe how you handled a complex financial situation and the questions that were important to you as you navigated that process.

Currently my day-to-day job involves threading the needle of how do we grow revenue while also expanding margin and to do that I look at the ROI on each decision in both the constraints of the current fiscal year, but also on our long range horizon to our targets.

 

I would use the same lenses to evaluate decisions for the Fraternity, looking at both at current year impact, but also the long-range impact. We’ll need to triage based on our immediate needs, and then alignment to long range goals.  What this means is that data and analytics needs to be in every decision that we make, even in places we might not have done in the past.  I see that if we have a data strategy, we could be using AI to analyze and predict trends for us so we can have plans in place, or options of plans before things come to pass. 

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