BridgeStreet Partners Recruits CFO for Communities Foundation of Texas
March 7, 2022 – BridgeStreet Partners has recruited Jim Berry as the new chief financial officer of the Communities Foundation of Texas (CFT), one of the largest community foundations in the U.S. CFT manages more than 1,000 component funds and has distributed over $2 billion in charitable grants.
Mr. Berry is an enterprise CFO with expertise in multiple industries such as not-for-profit, public company, and private equity. He has experience through a full ownership cycle, including liquidity event divestiture. He is experienced raising private capital from public markets, banks, alternative lenders, and other financing sources. Mr. Berry was most recently CFO of Harwood International Group, a global, vertically integrated real estate developer, general contractor, and hospitality operator with offices in Dallas; Beverly Hills, CA; Geneva; Paris; and London. Before that, he was CFO of Snelling Staffing. In this role, he had responsibility for all traditional finance and accounting, risk management, and IT functions, as well as lender and private equity sponsor relationships. Prior to this, Mr. Berry was CFO of Vasari, the largest operator of Dairy Queen restaurants in the South and the second largest in the U.S.
BridgeStreet Partners is a boutique retained search firm founded in 2007 with locations in New York; Los Angeles; Palo Alto, CA; Dallas; and Houston, TX. Each managing director brings over 20 years of retained search experience all with prior industry backgrounds. Its managing directors have been CFOs, CIOs, partners in consulting, and sales and marketing executives.
Boutique Firm
“Being a boutique of seasoned executive search professionals spread across the country, our operations have not drastically changed,” said Dave Westberry, managing director at BridgeStreet Partners. “We have always been very hands-on and highly collaborative. But, like most people, instead of conference calls and in-person interviews, we moved to video conferencing. And, we recently have moved to a new, much more dynamic database to ensure that our clients continue to receive the best service possible.”
New Pressures on CFOs
Immediate concerns around cash flow, liquidity and the bottom line are taking precedence at many companies due to continued fallout from the pandemic. But there are high-value lessons emerging from the current health and economic crisis that chief financial officers should bear in mind, according to recruiters specializing in finding talent for finance functional roles.
Executive Search Review Special Issue: Financial Services Recruiting
Hunt Scanlon Media has just released our latest special issue of ESR. This time around we take an in-depth look at the challenges financial services firms are facing in their hunt for new talent.
We cover it all: How CFOs are confronting new layers of risk in the pandemic era; the rapid and dramatic change coming at the CFO; using people analytics to acquire top talent, predict performance & reduce turnover; and why banks are turning to search firms. We even provide our latest “Financial Fifty Recruiters” ranking of financial services search firms! In this special issue of ESR, Hunt Scanlon editors take an extraordinary inside look at recruiting during these unprecedented times. Click here and enjoy.
The COVID-19 crisis thrust CFOs into the spotlight as never before, they report, while the pandemic also created a business environment in which CFOs have been uniquely positioned to drive business value during the recovery phase.
Related: Crisis Management: CFOs Confront New Layers of Risk in Pandemic Era
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
