Crews Consulting Group Hires Finance Services President
If you know me personally, you know that I love building companies.
There’s nothing more exciting than developing an idea for a new business and then buckling up for the inevitable roller coaster ride that follows.
As a business consultant, I firmly believe that connection to entrepreneurship is one of my biggest assets.
I’m not helping clients based on “that one time I had a company.” I’m able to share my own personal experiences based on what happened in my business yesterday or last week.
And THAT means I’ve got to practice what I preach.
It’s one thing to teach these ideas. It’s quite another to put them into practice inside your own company.
Inside our consulting company, we’re in a phase of rapidly expanding our finance services function. So in the spirit of sharing my experience with fellow entrepreneurs, I thought I’d give you a look behind the curtain at how we’re growing our finance services division.
Finance Services Division—Our Trajectory
Our finance services function started as a small team of consultants: one CFO, one controller, and one bookkeeper. They were great at what they did and kept our small group of clients happy.
But as we expanded, I knew we needed somebody with true financial expertise and acumen (that’s not me) to drive the business. So we hired Steve Chunias, an experienced CFO, CPA, and all-around financial wizard.
On the surface, it might have looked like we hired Steve before we were ready.
But when we modeled out what we would need in terms of clients and staff, we had the data to know we could make it work (having a CFO there to create that model certainly helped).
Results of Making a Key Hire
The results of bringing Steve on board speak for themselves. In just a few months, we:
- doubled the size of our finance team
- close to tripled our client load
- fixed some issues with our business model to improve profitability
- are set to generate over $1 million in revenue from finance services alone this year
What would happen if we hadn’t hired Steve?
We would be considerably smaller, less profitable, and lacking a key quality management function.
I would recognize those problems, but (again) I’m not a finance expert. So I’d be tearing my hair out trying to get these issues resolved—without the right resources to really get the job done.
Thankfully, I’ve made that exact same mistake before and actually learned something from it. I’ve learned it’s much better to find the expert who can solve your problems than learn how to do everything yourself (the “who not how” concept if you happen to be a Dan Sullivan fan).
As the Visionary of the company, I’m responsible for setting the direction of the organization. Once we determined that our vision was bold and aggressive, we knew what kind of “who” we were looking for.
If you haven’t met Steve Chunias yet, I hope you’ll have the opportunity to do so soon. Check out his official bio below, and please reach out if you have any finance needs inside your business. We are, as always, happy to do whatever we can to help.
Steve Chunias is President of the Finance Division for Crews Consulting Group, where he leads a team of finance consultants committed to driving business growth. With over 20 years of experience in the finance industry working for multimillion dollar firms, Steve has mastered financial management and strategic planning. Among Steve's countless achievements throughout his career, Steve is most proud of successfully selling 4 businesses in which he was a principal and helping small to midsize companies raise over 1 billion dollars in bank financing and equity.
Steve holds a M.B.A. in Finance, a B.S. in Accounting, and is a CPA in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. He has taught Accounting at the University of Massachusetts and participates annually in the Pan-Mass Challenge to raise funds for cancer research.
