The call came in 2013. I was thirty, Director of Finance at a $40M HVAC manufacturer's rep where I'd already done the rebuild work once — reengineered systems, cleaned up the books, restructured the banking — and I was ready for a bigger canvas.
The president of Tower Engineering Professionals, a $60M+ engineering services firm with forty-plus divisions across the US and Canada, told me he needed someone to rescue a $55M M&A that was in process and in trouble. The private equity acquirer was doing due diligence. The books hadn't been closed in over a year. The due diligence team was finding things. The leverage was draining out of the deal every week they couldn't produce clean statements.
He offered me the seat as Director of Finance & Administration, with the implicit role of Interim CFO for as long as it took to get the M&A closed and the new structure running.
I took it.
What followed was two years of the hardest work I'd done to that point — and the education that made every seat since possible.
Day One: Understanding What You've Actually Walked Into
The first week at Tower, I did what I've done at every engagement since: I started mapping cash.
Not the P&L. Not the ledger. Not the consolidated statements — those were fiction, because the books hadn't closed. I started with cash. Where did money come from, across 40+ divisions? Where did it go? Who had spending authority? Which bank accounts were active and which had gone dormant? Which subsidiaries held their own cash, and which swept to master?
Within three days I had something that looked like a map. Within a week, I had a list of questions that nobody at the company had been able to answer coherently.
Some of what I found in that first week:
- Three bank accounts that nobody could fully explain — one held what looked like old customer deposits, one was a dormant payroll account from a subsidiary that had been folded, one was the operating account of a division that had been acquired years ago and never fully integrated.
- $1M+ in billing errors across divisions that had been processing invoices for months without reconciling back to contracts. Work had been done. Customers had been billed. But the amounts weren't matching the contracts. In some cases we'd undercharged. In most cases we'd overcharged and the customer had quietly written us back — and those write-backs had been absorbed into other accounts.
- Intercompany balances that didn't match. Division A said it was owed $340K by Division B; Division B's books showed it owed $180K. Over a year's worth of unreconciled transactions.
- A DBA that was technically a separate legal entity but was being accounted for as if it were a department. Tax exposure nobody had quantified.
The books hadn't been closed in over a year. Until you walk into one of those, you cannot imagine how much drift builds up in the day-to-day of forty-plus divisions with no financial truth to anchor against.
Why the M&A Was Sideways
Here's the thing about M&A due diligence: buyers don't just want clean books. They want defensible books. They want you to be able to explain every material number, produce every supporting document, and walk them through the story behind any anomaly.
Tower couldn't do any of that. Not because the people were bad — most of the accounting staff was competent and trying hard — but because the process was broken and nobody had been given the authority, the time, or the mandate to fix it.
The PE acquirer was finding things. Every week of the DD process, a new discovery. Every discovery ratcheted down the leverage. The longer it dragged, the more money was coming off the deal price — and at the same time, the fees for advisors, lawyers, and investment bankers were accruing against both sides of the table.
The president needed the DD nightmare to end. Not by obscuring what was wrong — the PE firm was already too deep for that — but by producing the real numbers, fast, and defending them well enough that the deal could close.
That was the brief.
The Forty-Five Day Close
I told him I thought I could close the books in under forty-five days. He told me nobody had closed Tower's books in under sixty days in the last three years, and most months they hadn't closed at all. I told him I thought it could be done.
The gap between what I said and what I actually knew was wide. I didn't have a plan yet. I had pattern recognition from Faulkner/Haynes and from K. Hovnanian — I knew what a working finance function looked like — and I had enough stubbornness not to back off the commitment once I'd made it.
What actually got us to a clean close in forty-five days, for the first time in company history:
1. We stopped trying to reconcile history. The existing team had been trying to unwind a year of drift. That was a losing battle. Instead, we drew a line — here's where we are, this is the opening balance we're defending — and started closing forward from that line, cleanly, every week. The history could be cleaned up later. The NOW had to be right.
2. We consolidated cash first. The bank accounts were the anchor point for every other reconciliation. Once every dollar of cash was identified, tagged to an account, and reconciled to the bank statement, we had a defensible base to build from. Everything else — AR, AP, intercompany, accruals — could be worked out from there.
3. We addressed the billing errors in writing. $1M+ in billing errors couldn't be swept aside. We identified each one, calculated the true exposure, and booked the adjustments with clear memos explaining what happened. The PE firm was going to find these anyway. Finding them ourselves and documenting our methodology converted what would have been a valuation discount into an affirmative signal about our financial discipline.
4. We mirrored every intercompany transaction. The $340K / $180K mismatches got unwound, every line, until every dollar Division A owed Division B showed up symmetrically on both sets of books. This was tedious, manual work. It took two staff accountants most of a month. But it closed the credibility gap with the acquirer in a way no explanation could have.
5. We stood up NetSuite. Tower was running on a collection of QuickBooks instances, Excel spreadsheets, and a legacy system that was older than I was. Part of the PE firm's interest in the deal was the promise of post-close scale — and that scale required real ERP infrastructure. I made the case for NetSuite during due diligence, got it approved, and deployed it. Not the whole company on day one, but the financial backbone, fast enough that the acquirer saw the scaffolding before closing.
6. I personally owned the M&A reporting. The DD team wanted specific reports on specific things, often with less than 48 hours' notice. I built those reports myself, signed off on them myself, and sat in every question session to defend them. When you can answer questions about material numbers in real time, in detail, with the underlying workbook open on the table, you convert the DD process from adversarial to collaborative. That was the unlock.
Forty-five days to first close. Sixty days to all required M&A reports. The deal closed. Not at the original price — some leverage had already walked off — but close enough to make the PE firm a good return and close enough to make the Tower ownership a fair exit.
What the Rescue Taught Me
I've done a version of this work in every seat since. It's the reason I can walk into a business and, within a month, show the CEO things they didn't know about their own operation. It's the reason I built the CHE operating model the way I did. It's the reason I can coach other finance leaders into the same posture.
The specific lessons from Tower:
Lesson 1: Cash is always the anchor point. Always. When everything else is uncertain, map cash. Cash is the one thing that doesn't lie, because the bank statement is the bank statement. Every reconciliation starts from there. Every story about the business has to reconcile back to what cash actually did.
Lesson 2: In a rescue, don't try to reconcile history. Draw a line. If the books are a mess, the instinct is to unwind everything. Don't. Draw a line, defend your opening balance, and start closing forward cleanly from the line. You buy credibility FAST by showing clean close discipline going forward — and you earn the time to clean up history later.
Lesson 3: Own the hard conversations. The billing errors weren't mine. I didn't create them. But I owned the disclosure of them. Every CFO eventually learns that being the person who brings bad news CAREFULLY is a feature, not a bug — it's what makes you a trusted steward of the numbers. The ones who hide things get fired. The ones who disclose things well get promoted.
Lesson 4: The ERP decision is a trust decision. NetSuite at Tower wasn't about the ERP — it was about showing the acquirer we were serious about building a defensible financial infrastructure. That signal was worth more than any specific feature the ERP delivered. I've used the same pattern at every subsequent engagement: the right technology choice at the right moment is as much about SIGNALING discipline as it is about delivering capability.
Lesson 5: Buyers want DEFENSIBILITY, not perfection. A clean-but-explainable imperfection is worth more than a messy attempt at perfection. Show the scars and the stitches. Explain how they happened and what you did about them. PE firms aren't afraid of problems; they're afraid of undiagnosed problems.
Lesson 6: Real finance leadership is solving the business problem through the numbers. Tower's problem wasn't bad accounting. Tower's problem was an M&A that was going sideways. The accounting work was in service of a deal close, and I never lost sight of that. Every decision I made — what to clean up first, what to disclose how, when to deploy NetSuite, which staff to hire — was a subordinate decision to the primary goal: close this deal well.
The Transition Out
When the deal closed, the acquirer needed to stand up their own team. The PE firm brought in a CFO, I was asked to train my successor for 6-9 months, and then move on.
This is where I made what was probably the most important unglamorous decision of my career: I transitioned the seat deliberately, over time, without drama. I trained the incoming CFO, the Controller, the HR Director, and managed the reporting to the PE acquirer through the entire transition period. Then I stepped out cleanly.
Two things happened because of that transition work.
One: the Tower president and the PE firm both became reference calls that I could use for years afterward. The "I saved his business" version of that story was a full-tilt-sales pitch. The ACTUAL story — "he ran a difficult rescue with integrity and handed the seat to the next team cleanly" — was more powerful with hiring committees.
Two: I learned that the seat after the rescue matters as much as the rescue itself. Coming in hot and solving the crisis is half the work. Handing the business to the next team so THEY can scale it is the other half. Most rescue-operators don't do the second half well. It's a distinct skill, and it's what separates the people who keep getting called for bigger rescues from the people who do one and get branded as too spicy to work with long-term.
What It Really Cost
Everyone asks about the work. Nobody asks about the toll.
Two years of 70-hour weeks. Missed weekends. Missed kids' events. Jen carried the home — full stop — through the worst of it. I came out the other end with real career capital but also real debt to my family that took years to repay.
I'd do it again. But I'd also tell you honestly: don't romanticize rescue work. The work is real. The fees are real. The reputation upside is real. But the cost to your life is real too, and young finance leaders who want to build a reputation as a rescue operator should go in with their eyes open.
I would not trade what I learned at Tower for any MBA program in the world. I also would not tell a younger version of myself to take that seat without Jen's full and explicit understanding of what the next two years were going to look like.
Closing
Twelve years later, I still use the Tower playbook. The first week at CHE in 2023, I mapped cash. The first quarter, I drew a line and started closing forward cleanly. The first year, I deployed NetSuite as the financial backbone. Every step of that was practiced at Tower first.
ITABWODI works at scale because the posture behind it is transferable — the same question I asked at Campbell in 2001 I asked at Tower in 2013. Is there a better way of doing it? Almost every time, the answer is yes. The question is whether you have the stamina and the integrity to actually go find it.
At Tower, I found it.
At every seat since, I've kept looking.