In his first “60 to 90 days” as CFO of Presidio, Manny Korakis learned that preparation doesn’t cancel pressure, he tells us. “Now the buck stops here,” he tells us, and he “didn’t really appreciate the pace” required until he was living it daily, he tells us.
Korakis traces his move into enterprise thinking back to the McGraw Hill companies. Early on, he was “very technical” and “pretty close” to a singular controllership focus, he tells us. Then a mentor CFO pulled him into what they called the “growth and value plan,” he tells us. He worked on the “system landscape” and “data flow,” and on portfolio decisions about which assets were core and which were “distracting,” he tells us. That work drove the separation of McGraw Hill Education from the rest of McGraw Hill and a rebranding to “S&P Global,” he tells us. It also surfaced “hidden gems of value,” he tells us. Seeing theory turn “real life” became his “aha moment,” he tells us.
Read MoreIn a later chapter, Korakis served as CFO of S&P Dow Jones Indices, where partners were aligned “in many cases,” but “not always aligned,” he tells us, requiring balance of “different needs and expectations,” he tells us.
That arc shapes how he defines finance: not just “counting the beans,” but “highlighting the key things” so others decide better, he tells us. Today, he says finance “own[s] the model” for where Presidio wants to go, he tells us, and AI starts with “bite sized pieces,” he explains.
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CFOTL: What would you tell us about Presidio? What’s the company about, and what was the opportunity that attracted you?
Korakis: Presidio is a leading global technology services and solutions provider. What really attracted me was the market we participate in. When you look across the IT landscape, there are specific pockets—cloud computing, cybersecurity, and the value-added services Presidio provides—that are healthy, growing parts of the industry. I saw significant opportunity to add value to our customer base, which we are actively doing, and that was very enticing to me. Overall, it felt like a great opportunity to join a very well-respected business operating in a high-growth industry.
ReadCFOTL: Can you share a bit about Presidio’s capital structure and an abbreviated history of the company?
Korakis: Sure. If you go back historically, Presidio has been private-equity owned for quite some time, with a couple of different sponsors over the years. The business originally started as something of a roll-up of Cisco VARs, and over time it expanded well beyond that—into hyperscalers, software sales, and more value-added services—while also diversifying its OEM mix. We continue to be private-equity sponsored today. There was a short period when Presidio was a public company before returning to private ownership, but all of that happened before my tenure here. Today, we remain private-equity backed, continue to grow, and are very pleased with both the pace of that growth and the expansion opportunities ahead of us.
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