Interviewed By Maryan Aiken
“The role we play as CFOs is one of those roles that usually is not needed in smaller companies,”
eric neumann. cfo. new life cfo
Eric W Neumann
CFO
University of Colorado at Denver
Accounting
Company Name: New Life CFO
Company Established: 2013
Number of Employees: 11
17766 Preston Road Dallas, TX 75252
214 775 0803
www.newlifecfo.com
Social Media Handles: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neumanneric/
Charity Involvement: LadiesTurnGlobal.org; Woman to Woman Health Center (Dallas, TX)/Involved for Life
ABOUT NEW LIFE CFO
We provide professional CFO services to companies needing financial guidance for growth, M&A, and the crossroads where difficulty meets mission.
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Q: What Was Your First Job Ever
I was flipping burgers and filling soft drinks at Burger King by 14 years old. I became store manager on Sundays (the slowest days) at 15 years old. Virtually all the employees were my peers in high school. I had to wear a tie, post the daily activity to the books (there were no computers, just a ten-key calculator), and manage other teenagers all while the owner sat and observed me for an hour or two from the dining room. He spoke to me with advice only once in two years. I guess I did okay.
Q: What are the key elements that your company offers?
In a phrase, Financial Leadership. For example, a company could be in a turn-around situation and needs heavy lifting from a CFO to restructure the company’s cost, performance, and capital structure. Other companies hire us because they are in M&A mode and need a CFO to evaluate/negotiate the deal(s) and integrate acquisitions. Sometimes a company needs financial leadership on a major project that the existing CFO simply doesn’t have time to take on. Each client has different needs, which means every project is unique and interesting.
Q: What factors led to your biggest success?
For me, it’s been a combination of being in the right place at the right time, and having the right discipline to work long hours, especially when the boss didn’t know it. From my earliest days in business, I regularly would work overtime in order to get the results we needed, on time and accurately. No one needed to know what hurdles I had to overcome (and there were so many!). My first job out of college with an accounting degree (’91), was as the bookkeeper for two radio stations, while simultaneously serving as the analyst for the station owner’s consulting business that he ran on the side. We traveled all over the country meeting with other radio owners, and I learned the radio business quickly and deeply. I was exposed to knowledge that would normally take years, if not a decade, to learn.
When the opportunity came in 1993 to co-found a new radio company that had been funded by a private equity firm for the purpose of buying up dozens of radio stations in the top 30 markets, I was ready for the CFO role. We took the company public on the NASDAQ in 1996, with help from our management team, the CEO, equity backers Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst here in Dallas, plus several investment bankers, attorneys and CPAs of course. By the fall of 1997, our company owned 54 radio stations in 15 of the largest markets in the country, generating $330 million of revenue and $147 million EBITDA. We sold our company to Dallas-based Evergreen Media later that year for $2.5 billion. The combined company was acquired by iHeartMedia three years later. It was a wild ride for just seven years out of college. I was someone who had only an accounting degree and a lot of determination – not a family pedigree or well-placed connections. Just grit and luck!
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Q: What do you like most about what you do?
That’s easy. Helping people! There is little that is intuitive about accounting, finance and maximizing returns for a business. There is a reason thousands of books, seminars and white-papers have been written on the topic for nearly a hundred years. If it were easy, every would-be, could-be and bona-fide entrepreneur would succeed wildly! It takes a vision, a team and know-how from many disciplines. The role we play as CFOs is one of those roles that usually is not needed in smaller companies, but as they grow to employ more than a couple dozen people while serving hundreds of clients or more, the complexity becomes too great to continue without the CFO skillset. If I can help someone realize their vision, that makes it worth it. .
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Q: Who are the business leaders that you look up to, and why?
Well, that list is long. I have learned numerous valuable lessons and insights from so many people I’ve either worked for or alongside. The first I’ll mention are those who bet on me and taught me so much in my earliest days, when I did not know what I did not know. That’s the founding CEOs of Chancellor Broadcasting and Capstar Broadcasting, along with their equity team from Hicks, Muse, Tate & Furst. Without that dozen or so influences during those first ten years of my career, I don’t believe I would have had the other learning opportunities that came later.
Separately, I’ve also always admired Luca Di Montezemolo for his achievements as a maverick who went well beyond expectations. He is an Italian aristocrat by birth, but he never rested on his unearned wealth. He was hired as president of Ferrari in 1991, with the goal of turning around the company’s road car division and Formula One racing division, which had struggled since Enzo Ferrari's death in 1988. Luca set a goal to win the Constructors’ Championship for the first time since 1983, which he did eight times, in addition to six Driver’s Championships. Luca’s success with Ferrari set a new high bar for the sport. When my wife and I toured the factory in 1999, Ferrari was valued at $800M, and today the company is worth $57B – even though it sells just 44% more units than it did when Luca took over. It was Luca who built Ferrari into the luxury brand it is today, by focusing on four core values – Courage, Innovation, Performance, and Passion. If any initiative didn’t meet all four characteristics – it wouldn’t get done at Ferrari. I love that! Of course, this formula doesn’t apply to every type of business, but how else do you run a sports car company and racing team? Since Luca left the company, Ferrari F1 has stagnated, sadly, but the road cars continue to be spectacular achievements. I can’t believe there isn’t a movie or book about this guy!
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Q: What exciting projects are you working on? Please explain why?
I am currently working with a couple of different clients in difficult situations. What I see generally is too much debt, not enough revenue, or costs outrunning revenue. It’s often some combination of the three. Given my eternally optimistic outlook I believe we can fix the problems and return these companies to better days. Three of the last four companies I’ve worked for prior to New Life CFO were distressed companies in very different situations. In all three, we were able push the wolves back at the door and get the companies back on track to either a healthy exit for the owners or viability for the company’s next phase. It can be thrilling to help the founders fix their business and get them on track to realizing their vision and achieving financial success for themselves and their families.
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Q: Tell us the books you’ve enjoyed and why or what are the lessons from that book that impacted you the most.
I’ve read at least a hundred books I would recommend to anyone, but one that stands out as illuminating and useful to understanding systems and outcomes in all endeavors is “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb. In this book, Taleb stresses the differences between being antifragile and robust or resilient. “Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better.” This book is from his “incerto,” a five-volume philosophical essay about uncertainty that Taleb published between 2001 and 2018 (“The Black Swan” is the other most known volume from the collection). I had to read it three times to fully grasp its message. But it really stuck as something to think about. How can I be antifragile, can I teach my kids to be antifragile, can a business be antifragile? It’s really a fresh, expanded take on what our grandparents used to tell us – “that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” Well, I want to explore ways to find opportunity and strength from disorder.
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Q: Three things that we should absolutely know about you.
1) I know too much trivia about music because it seems to stick in my brain easier than anything else. I listen to a lot of music and still listen to vinyl from my teen years.
2) I love cooking, grilling and smoking meat nearly every day of the week, but I have no desire to open a restaurant. I bussed and waited tables in the ‘80s. Those were fun times for sure, but I love being a CFO. I know I couldn’t handle the stress of cooking for hundreds of people every night.
3) Formula One and Football are the only sports I follow. I love the life lessons or metaphors that football brings forth. And F1 is such a high-tech team exercise in excellence measured in hundredths of a second. I marvel when humans achieve such excellence under pressure. F1 is not just about the drivers; it’s equally the engineering ingenuity and teams of 100+ people who make it work. It’s a high-speed circus on a wire. Before our kids were born, my wife and I went to several races and had the chance to interact with some of the team members. Those people are really driven! Oops a pun.
Q: Business secret you’re comfortable sharing with the world?
I can’t say it’s a secret, but Deep Due Diligence is always the answer to solving a seemingly intractable business problem. It’s just a process that takes time, focus, and clarity, and many people aren’t willing to do it. I think of it as finding a diamond in the rough. You have to look hard for it, harder than everyone else. All else follows…
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Q: Have you won any awards?
No awards. With what I do, I only have “skins on the wall” stories. Not formally recognized accomplishments, but an apt metaphor for stories that are unique to my experience – like a game hunter might have animal skins on their wall and wild stories to go with it.
I worked with a team that built a music app in 2001 that led to the major record labels suing us for copyright infringement. What we built was nothing like Napster, we weren’t stealing and were always going to pay royalties. However, at the time the record labels believed our app would be so useful no one would buy music again. It’s a bit of a long story, but we settled with the labels, yet it scared our investors away and the start-up crashed.
Nonetheless, in 2010 the US Supreme Court made a ruling based on the original lawsuit that fully vindicated our methodology – a huge win if one understands the intricacies and effects. And in fact, the big labels ended up signing off on our technology as approved for statutory licensing and viable! But it was too late being in the right, and even now the music apps today do not push the limits allowed by that ruling in the same way that we did.
Another odd skin on the wall story is that there is now a legal precedent in Delaware with my name on it. It’s called the “Neumann Letter” ruling which essentially declares that executives may not correspond with their disgruntled shareholders that are contemplating suing the company. Apparently, I was the first CFO to write a carefully scripted letter to a group of our shareholders that were upset with the company’s direction and interpretation of our shareholder agreement. I merely wrote a friendly letter explaining our legal strategy that would prevail and implored them not to waste good money after bad as they would incur legal fees that they couldn’t recoup. I knew they would lose 100%, I thought I should tell them – right? Wrong, as it turns out.
Their attorney must have given them some hope despite my warning letter as they pressed forward and did lose just how I said it would go down. However, the judge admonished me for essentially circumventing the legal system, and now that is a specific thing you may not do if you are a Delaware company. No matter how much the lawsuit may be unwarranted, you must let it run its course through the Delaware legal system – no warning letters allowed. But, on the bright side, the two lead plaintiffs did call me when it was over and thanked be for “being a gentleman during the process and trying to save them money.” That was my intent all along, I have nothing against lawyers, I’m married to one. I just wanted to do the right thing by all my shareholders even the ones that believed we were not handling the company affairs properly.
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For me, it’s been a combination of being in the right place at the right time, and having the right discipline to work long hours, especially when the boss didn’t know it
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Q: What advice would you give to your younger self?
Never let go of a network of people who embrace your skills and value you. I made that mistake in the early 2000’s, when I chased another venture with a different network of people. I had to build new networks without the history of people who knew what I could do. It was very hard, and it taught me a lot of lessons. If you are in a group that is achieving, and they want you along for the ride – assuming their principles line up with yours – it’s not always a good idea to pursue what you believe to be a greener pasture.
After a nervous breakdown derailed Jocelyn’s (Lily-Rose Depp) last tour, she’s determined to claim her rightful status as the greatest and sexiest pop star in America. Her passions are reignited by Tedros (Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye), a nightclub impresario with a sordid past. Will her romantic awakening take her to glorious new heights or the deepest and darkest depths of her soul?
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