Chartwell Partners Recruits CFO for Choice Health at Home
November 7, 2022 – Executive search firm Chartwell Partners has placed Jeff Kreger as CFO of Choice Health at Home (Choice), one of the Southwest’s largest and fastest growing providers of home health, hospice, rehabilitation, and private duty services. Partner William Ward led the assignment.
Mr. Kreger will partner with Choice’s CEO David Jackson, Choice’s leadership team, and the company’s financial sponsors Coltala Holdings and Trive Capital Management in overseeing the company’s growth and operating performance.
Mr. Kreger most recently served as CFO of Vitas Healthcare, one of the country’s largest providers of hospice services. He also held prior roles as CFO of Aegis Therapies, BioScrip, and earlier in his career CFO of LHC Group.
Chartwell Partners is an executive search firm focused on identifying and recruiting senior executives and board members for clients in four specific industries: biopharmaceuticals, healthcare services, financial services, and real estate.
Mr. Ward is a co-founding partner of Chartwell Partners and is based in Dallas. His search experience has spanned over 25 years and has exclusively focused on healthcare. His healthcare search experience has included corporate directors, C-suite executives, and numerous functional leaders, including operations, finance, sales and marketing, business development, and IT. He has worked with clients in most healthcare service sectors, including acute care, long-term care/post-acute, supply chain/distribution, ambulatory surgery, pharmacy services, home health, and hospice. Mr. Ward has also worked extensively with both large public companies and many notable private equity-backed businesses as well.
CFO Confidence Crisis
Few roles are as important as the chief financial officer at most companies, but the CFOs today who are thinking about tomorrow are growing nervous about a key talent issue: They worry that no one else in the company can assume their role.
Related: Executive Search Review Special Issue: Financial Services Recruiting
Indeed, according to one Korn Ferry study, 81 percent of CFOs surveyed say they want to groom the next CFO internally, but don’t believe that there’s a viable candidate in-house. Currently, about half of new roles are filled internally.
“The current CFO is the one charged with identifying and developing that talent, and since they know best the skills required to meet what’s coming, they are realizing the internal bench isn’t fully prepared,” said Bryan Proctor, senior client partner and global financial officers practice lead at Korn Ferry.
The lack of confidence is owed in part to CFOs feeling that their firms’ leadership development programs have failed to keep up with the rapidly changing role of CFO, Korn Ferry said. Core functions such as finance and accounting are increasingly being combined under one role, with CFOs citing a lack of resources or skills and career development opportunities as reasons for the merging. Korn Ferry surveyed more than 700 CFOs worldwide, asking them about their own internal talent pipelines. The top abilities CFOs feel their direct reports need to develop are “leadership skills and executive presence” and “strategic thinking.”
As CFOs Gain in Stature, Succession Plans to Replace Them Falter
As with all things in the business world, the role of a CFO has evolved over the past 10 years. Gone are the days of the CFO being the top accountant focused on the timely and accurate recording of transactions to generate a set of financial…
“The tapestry of skills and experiences CFOs of today and tomorrow need are vastly different than what was needed in the past,” said John Petzold, senior client partner and CXO optimization lead at Korn Ferry. “The reason subfunctions are merging is because the focus is less on a role or person and more about the capabilities that need to be covered by a set of individuals.”
In essence, the CFO function is being deconstructed for optimization, according to Korn Ferry. Leaders are breaking down necessary functions based on their organization’s strategy and identifying people with a combination of those skills and piecing them together to get the right set of talent to execute against that plan. Core financial functions such as taxes, capital allocation, and M&A still need to be done accurately and in compliance with regulations, of course. But experts say the CFO role is becoming more about adapting and deploying talent in the most efficient manner possible.
“The leadership profile of the future CFO is less about tactical, direct experience, and more about learning agility, adaptability, and big-picture global perspective,” said Mr. Proctor. “That kind of nimbleness and ability to pivot isn’t naturally ingrained in the typical CPA.”
Related: Chartwell Recruits COO for Triumph Business Capital
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Managing Editor; and Stephen Sawicki, Managing Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
