As listeners to our podcast well know, one of our favorite queries for finance executives who have had a lengthy tenure in one place is, “What kept you there?”
It may go without saying that something with the word “opportunity” in it is perhaps the most popular response. Still, for certain finance leaders—and especially those whose careers span multiple decades with a single company—this question often summons up a degree of self-reflection that few others bring forth.
Such was the case with Cox Enterprises President and CFO Dallas Clement, who afforded our question an extra modicum of contemplation that we had not expected before issuing some of the best career advice that has ever been shared on this podcast.
Read MoreTo be fair, we may have prejudged Clement in assuming that his expansive (33 years) and adventurous career within Cox had unfolded without any degree of uncertainty. However, Clement quickly dispersed our presumptions by unveiling two career snapshots.
The first came from the early 1990s, when Clement was contemplating exiting the environs of Cox’s Atlanta headquarters to practice law while living on the beach in Sarasota, Florida. “I had kept deferring law school, but at the time, I thought that this possibility might make for a pretty good life.”
Another came from nearly 15 years later, when Clement—now a father with four daughters—was touring homes with his wife in Silicon Valley as he evaluated the relocation possibilities associated with an appointment that he subsequently would reject. “Even if I wasn’t completely happy in my current role, it would have been disruptive to the kids and risky, so I didn’t leave,” explains Clement, who perhaps saves his best observations for those career-builders who like him have elected to stay put.
He advises: “Once you’ve gone through that exercise and decided to stay, don’t second-guess yourself. Be all in—not only in your professional role but also more broadly in your life, your family, your outside work activities—because work is what you do, it’s not who you are. Over time, I have learned to be more mature and thoughtful about this. I really appreciate how lucky I’ve been in a variety of areas.” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about Cox Enterprises … what does this company do, and what are its offerings today?
Clement: Well, we do many different things, which in 2022 produced $22 billion in revenue. In 2023, we’re celebrating our 125th anniversary. We started when Governor Cox bought the Dayton Daily News, the fifth largest newspaper in Dayton, Ohio, 125 years ago. Thus we started as a media company. We’ve always been willing to take risks on new technologies and new business models, even if they disrupted existing ones. We don’t take risks on financial matters, though—on things with high leverage.
In the governor’s will—and as part of our value set—he said, “Do right by the customers that you serve, do right by the communities that you’re involved with, and do right by your employees, and the shareholders and the family will be fine.” This was part of our value set back then, as it still is today.
Read MoreOver time, we evolved from newspapers into radio, into television, into cable. Some of the largest advertisers in those businesses are automotive, so we had connection points into the automotive sector that led us to buy Manheim Auto Auction in Manheim, Pennsylvania, back in the 1960s.
As we moved into the 1990s with radio, television, newspapers, cable, Manheim auctions, and Internet starts, we began to realize, “Well, it looks like classified advertising is going to go away from the newspaper business and onto the Internet, who is better equipped to start an online automotive classifieds site than Cox?” So, we started Autotrader.com.
Today, Cox Communications is our biggest company, generating $13 billion to $14 billion in revenue from Cox Communications; Cox Automotive, which is Manheim; Autotrader; software companies; and a little bit of international. We also have a floor plan financing business called NextGear. Cox Automotive does between $8 billion and $9 billion.
Over the past couple of years, as we’ve aggressively looked at opportunities to diversify these two big businesses, we’ve made investments and acquisitions in controlled-environment agriculture. One of these is BrightFarms, which builds and operates leafy green greenhouses. We’re the majority owner of Mucci Farms, which is also a greenhouse business that in this case is focused on vine crops like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and strawberries. We’ve also looked at new media, which led us to majority ownership of Axios, a digital journalism effort with a heavy focus on trying to figure out how to enable local journalism in a way that meets high journalistic standards yet also makes money.
jb
Cox Enterprises | www.coxenterprises.com | Atlanta, GA