751: The March Goes On | Dave Damond, CFO, March of Dimes

CFO THOUGHT LEADER

When does a mission-driven CFO initiate a crucial turnaround of an erstwhile nonprofit that’s been losing money for years and has a legacy pension plan dragging down its balance sheet? Before he’s even been offered the job. At least that’s how you take care of business if you’re March of Dimes Senior Vice President and CFO Dave Damond.

“I came in with a change management plan,” reveals the former KPMG auditor, who was a finance executive with American Red Cross before launching himself into his current role in 2018. “In fact, when I was interviewing, they showed me what the current table of organization looked like. And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s wrong – here’s what it should look like.”

Damond got the job, and immediately implemented his plan, which included replacing a 30-year-old legacy ERP installation with a cloud-based system (within a year), hiring new talent (including a controller) and addressing that drag on the balance sheet as interest rates fortuitously plummeted.

“We saw a lot of organizations were actually doing buyouts [of defined benefits pension plans],” Damond says while detailing the mechanics of his change plan. “It was something that we had to jump on right away, and we took that opportunity to offer buyouts to all of our people who were already retired.” The move saved the organization $20 million, adds Damond who also shares his take on cashflow analytics, fundraising KPIs, how he managed through COVID and the AI solutions that his finance group is considering investing in.