At Intel, Bruce Schuman remembers walking into a meeting as a controller, proud of a product change his team had worked on “for months.” Then CFO Andy Bryant asked one question—one that reframed the proposal around customer impact. “Nobody had thought about (it),” Schuman tells us, and that question “completely changed the entire conversation,” leading to a “10 times better” outcome.
That moment captures why Schuman spent “two decades plus 27 years” at Intel, he tells us. Rotational roles pushed him into new challenges every few years, while leaders modeled what influence and partnership looked like in practice. Intel even had a term for it—“constructive confrontation,” Schuman tells us—encouraging finance leaders to put difficult issues on the table in service of better decisions.
Read MoreWhen Schuman later moved into CFO roles outside Intel, he carried that mindset with him. FP&A, he says, should not simply “report the score of the game,” but act like “people on the field literally changing the outcome of the game,” Schuman tells us. That expectation shaped how he built finance teams and approached decision-making in smaller, faster-moving organizations.
Today, as CFO of Universal Technical Institute, Schuman applies those lessons to a mission-driven business focused on workforce development. UTI works with “about 35 OEM partners” and “about 6000 employer partners,” Schuman tells us, and measures success through “70% graduation rates” and “about 85% placement rates,” Schuman tells us. Growth remains disciplined: “We’ll never sacrifice student outcomes,” he tells us, even as the company plans to build “anywhere from two to five campuses a year for the next five years,” Schuman tells us.
Made Possible By
CFOTL: Tell us about Universal Technical Institute. What does the company do, and what sets it apart?
Schuman: Universal Technical Institute is the nation’s largest workforce solutions provider in the skilled trades. That includes classic skilled trades like auto, diesel, transportation, energy, robotics, automation, welding, HVAC—plus the other end of the spectrum in healthcare: the professions that surround the doctor and the professions that surround the dentist. We’re the nation’s largest education provider for those skilled-trades jobs. We train students for in-demand jobs in the U.S.
Our differentiators are how industry-aligned we are and our student outcomes. We have about 35 OEM partners across the U.S. and we tailor curriculum for those partners. We also have about 6,000 employer partners—these are the people hiring our graduates—and we’re very focused on meeting their needs.
Read MoreWe’re also proud of our outcomes: about 70% graduation rates and about 85% placement rates. It’s an amazing time to be in this sector. The U.S. desperately needs more skilled trades workers. The supply-demand gap has been large for decades and it’s only getting worse, especially with onshoring trends. There are about four to five jobs for every one of our graduates on the skilled-trades side, and about eight to ten jobs for every one of our graduates on the healthcare side. We alone can’t meet the need, but we’re playing a big part, and it’s an exciting place to be.
CFOTL: You describe UTI as mission-driven. What does that mean for finance—are there tradeoffs?
Schuman: There are tradeoffs, but first you have to start with the team. I have a finance team that’s really excited about the mission. People are motivated by the role we’re playing in this country, and that makes it exciting to be part of what finance does to enable the mission—providing as many opportunities as possible for an education in the skilled trades.
There’s a lot of angst right now about how AI will disrupt jobs. There’s also angst about whether a four-year degree is still worth it, given the debt people take on. We’re providing a really viable alternative. So the finance team is excited about what we do and energized about helping make that a reality for our students.
CFOTL: You’re coming up on your one-year anniversary. What changed in that first year in terms of resource allocation?
Schuman: It’s been a pretty big change. We had a first phase of what we called the North Star strategy, which was getting the company ready after a big acquisition. We bought Concorde Career Colleges, and now we have two divisions: the classic UTI skilled-trades side—where we’ve been around for 60 years—and Concorde, which brought us into healthcare skilled trades. We just celebrated our 60-year anniversary and got to ring the bell at the stock exchange, which was fun.
The first part of the North Star strategy was integrating that acquisition and capturing revenue synergies. The next phase—kind of the next five years—we’re in year two of that now, and it involves very significant capital deployment. We’ve never invested this much capital. We’ve said publicly we’ll build anywhere from two to five campuses a year for the next five years because the supply-demand gap is so strong. That’s a major shift in capital allocation and investment, and it puts finance front and center to make sure we allocate it properly. We have a lot of exciting work ahead.
Universal Technical Institute | www.uti.edu | Avondale, AZ