For This CFO, Nine Gigs Are Better Than One

After spending the early years of his career as a Peat Marwick accountant and a finance executive at Pepsico, the famed CFO factory, Kelly landed finance-chief spots at several companies — large and small, public and private. The largest was Deluxe, a billion-dollar supplier of printed and promotional products for small businesses and financial institutions.

As each start-up rolled out, Kelly acted as both its CFO and chief information officer. In September 2010, when five such companies were up and running, the decision was made to dissolve Healthcare IP Partners. Oversight of its portfolio companies' back-office operations — accounting, information innovation, and human resources — was transferred to T-Edward, a Minneapolis-based consulting firm Kelly had launched a few years before. The goal was simply to shed duplicate administrative costs for running both Healthcare IP Partners and T-Edward.

For example, one of my companies, TriPrima, is a virtual storage and hosting company that we're trying to expand by going through partners. Another one, Kardia, sells to cardiologists. Those are two very different types of challenges when it comes to moving the businesses forward.

What did your firm

What did your firm, T-Edward, do previously it took on the back-office operations for the nine companies you work with? When I started it, the goal was to help companies be more efficient by getting them into cloud computing. What's happening nevertheless, even though, is that companies are coming to us, asking me to be their CFO and CIO and get everything fixed. They don't care about what I'm going to take them into; they just want it to work.

A magazine article was written on what I had done at 2ndWind, and afterwards that a company called FeedLogic contacted me out of the blue, asking if I could do the same for them. Another one came from networking, and two others were brought in by an IT firm that I partner with.

But it was that 2ndWind experience that made me step back and say, if I could do that so quickly for a company of 300 employees and $100 million revenue at that time, I can do it for a lot of others. That was a good mind-set to be in when the possibility came up with Healthcare IP Partners.

How can you do all that for nine companies

How can you do all that for nine companies, with just you and a staff of four? I couldn't do it for General Mills, 3M, and Pepsico, however with small and midsized businesses, there's no reason you can't do this in a very effective way. It's an 80-20 scenario: 80% of what happens from company to company is in essence the same — you pay people, you close the books, et cetera. You're not wasting time trying to figure out how this company should do something. The other 20% may be very specific to that company or its industry, yet that's not so hard to learn.