Chief Financial Officer Position Profile
ABOUT PRO-TEK
For over 20 years, Champlain Capital has been a private equity fund that has partnered with U.S. lower middle-market companies looking to take advantage of the firm’s C-level expertise. Champlain’s One-Stop Solution and fully transparent working style, diverse professional experience and collaborative process result in simpler and faster transactions for all parties.
Champlain partners with companies in niche businesses, including consumer products, manufacturing, business services, healthcare and value-added distribution, whom the firm believes offer significantly higher growth potential than their size implies. The firm is comprised of experienced, engaged investors and operators focused on crafting enduring strategic plans, developing organizational capabilities, and improving functional operations to create lasting value.
Champlain Capital is expected to complete the acquisition of Pro-Tek Vaults (Pro-Tek), the media and archive division of LAC Group, in July 2021. Originally part of Kodak, the company was purchased by LAC Group in 2015 with a vision to provide value-added services in addition to storage capabilities. Today, Pro-Tek is a leading provider of asset storage, preservation, organization and curation for film and digital media for production and Studio companies. Prominent customers include Paramount, Disney, Warner Brothers, Amazon, Miramax, Viacom, Sony, HBO, NBC, and ABC, among others. Resident in the business is an extensive and wide-ranging understanding of the capabilities and challenges of film and digital asset management, including the issues and opportunities it presents for archivists as they face aging media libraries and an increasingly digital future.
The array of services Pro-Tek provides includes: • Physical storage in facilities with strict temperature, humidity, seismic engineering and state-of-the art fire protection features • Film preservation and repair • Digitization, meta-tagging, cataloging, and converting from one media format to others so content can be played on different platforms. • Data integrity services across all film and digital formats as even minor data loss impairs the viewability of the content.
Pro-Tek is highly trusted by its customers to store, protect and manage the original tapes of some of their most vital assets. For example, The Godfather, Star Wars, The Hobbit, Pulp Fiction, and Casablanca are just a few of the films housed at Pro-Tek. Pro-Tek’s Thousand Oaks, CA warehouses are the only commercially available frozen media storage facilities in the world. The need to store and protect “classic films” is self-evident. The media can be fragile and the many reels the typical film requires are very heavy, making them difficult and costly to store on the Studio lots where real estate is at an absolute premium. Even with newer digital media, due to the investment and value of that media, as well as the instability over time of digital copies, Studios always create taped backups that require the same storage needs of older films. Furthermore, Studios make multiple backups of these films in order to have the ability to cannibalize frames that need to be spliced into a master version as the medium degrades or is damaged.
As a standalone business with a new sponsor, Pro-Tek will have the necessary support to capitalize on the growth in entertainment content production fueling direct-to-consumer streaming services and other media outlets. Protek is well-positioned to meet the archival needs of new media, as well as prepare archived libraries of content for inclusion within an expanded set of digital streaming service offerings. As an independent entity, the company will also be better equipped to pursue other growth opportunities, such as servicing the needs of a broad range of corporate clients. We believe there is a real opportunity to double (and more) the size of the company’s sales and EBITDA over the next five years.
POSITION OVERVIEW
A growing team, Pro-Tek is seeking a strong, entrepreneurial Chief Financial Officer who will take on responsibility for all accounting, controls, financial reporting, budgeting, financial planning, and forecasting. This individual will be a leader who will provide hands-on and day-to-day management of all financial functions and best practices. As a member of the core leadership team, the CFO will provide informed and objective counsel on business issues and will offer technical and experience-based advice to peer executives and staff. This role will require a background in a manufacturing environment or equivalent and preferred experience working in a private equity-backed entity. Along with the rest of the executive leadership team, this individual should be a strong and proactive advocate for value creation and company integration. The successful candidate must be intellectually sharp and clearly capable of thinking on their feet while demonstrating outstanding business judgment. The CFO will possess the analytical skills to drive costs from the business, improve overall productivity and elevate the company’s technology advances as points of differentiation in the marketplace. The individual will be highly entrepreneurial, thrive on collaboration, promoting strong ethics and intellectual honesty within the organization.
DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES
- Build a best-in-class financial department by promoting and instilling a culture of personal learning and professional development.
- Ensure the finance team has a clear and compelling vision of 'what great looks like' and a plan around how to achieve it.
- Develop and maintain strong relationships with leaders across the company in order to evaluate business performance.
- Entrepreneurial stylings, excellent communication skills and strategic thinking ability.
- Coordinate the overall financial activities of the company; lead corporate finance, cash management, tax strategy and regulatory compliance and planning, accounting reporting, planning and analytics, budgeting, forecasting, credit, AR/AP, and payroll.
- Oversee IT and HR and Risk Management.
- Lead banking relationships.
- Build a budgeting and analysis capability.
- Monitor and advise on trends that influence inventory planning and capital outlay.
- Ensure that information systems and reporting tools provide members with the information needed to make sound business decisions.
- Work with external auditors.
- All financial statements are created accurately and on time.
- Manage and oversee production of monthly financial updates.
- Manage vendor relationships and interviewing of potential vendors (i.e., health insurers, retirement planning, IT vendors, etc.).
- Maximize productivity of the company’s financial resources and optimize financial statements.
- Ensure proper risk mitigation through systematic risk assessment and risk mitigation tools and processes.
CRITICAL COMPETENCIES FOR SUCCESS
Critical Thinker
Combines analytical and creative horsepower to simplify and break down complex situations into the core of issues with easy to understand action items. This individual must be intellectually sharp and use critical thinking to make or influence decisions while demonstrating outstanding business judgement. They will be comfortable creating the new and the different and have a ravenous appetite to learn more and experiment in a disciplined way.
Strategic Agility
This individual must be intellectually sharp and clearly capable of thinking on their feet while demonstrating outstanding business judgment. The CFO will possess skills to improve overall productivity of the company and elevate Pro-Tek’s value proposition in the marketplace. This person must not only embrace change but draw on resilience to alter their road map along the way based on the current marketplace and feedback.
EDUCATION & EXPERIENCE REQUIREMENTS
Experience
- Bachelor’s degree in business or accounting required and ten (10) plus years of progressive related experience. MBA preferred.
- Professional certification such as CPA (Certified Public Accountant) preferred.
- Five (5) plus years of supervisory experience required.
- Possess exceptional knowledge of GAAP, IRC, FASB, accrual-based accounting, organizational auditing, fixed asset accounting, and tax filing requirements.
Competencies
- Strong interpersonal skills, ability to quickly build rapport, establish credibility, and work as part of a cross-functional team
- Ability to develop and maintain relationships with business stakeholders through accountability, following up on requests and delivering on commitments
- Analytical thinking and storytelling – able to extract insights from structured and unstructured data and communicate in a way that motivates change
- Experience with digital tools (Office Suite, Slack, Teams, etc.)
- Basic knowledge of website development
- Experience with web analytics tools, such as Adobe Analytics or Google Analytics
- A desire to advocate, driven by strong empathy for the user, that is paired with the ability to communicate informed design rationale and value
- Strong written, verbal, and presentation skills; strong interpersonal skills
- Strong process design skills and operational orientation
- Strong ability to partner across multiple disciplines and navigate a matrix organization
- Understanding of how to use data and metrics to back up assumptions and contribute to project business cases
- Ability to work efficiently and demonstrate a bias for action in a fast-paced, sometimes ambiguous environment
FOR MORE INFORMATION PLEASE CONTACT:
Paul Herrerias
Title: Managing Director Email: pherrerias@comharpartners.com Direct: (415) 483-4116 Mobile: (415) 302-5300
Title: Director
Email: gasad@comharpartners.com
Direct: (212) 202-0251
Mobile: (718) 210-5547
