Before his career became closely tied to middle-market businesses, Scott Thorell built his foundation in larger arenas. He began at Ernst & Young in New York, auditing financial services firms, then moved to Campbell Soup Company, where financial and operational audit assignments took him to Australia, Hong Kong, Europe, and locations across the United States, Thorell tells us. Those chapters gave him technical range and global perspective.
But the defining stretch of his career emerged after he returned home. In entrepreneurial and founder-led businesses around Philadelphia, titles mattered less than adaptability. At 28, he was unexpectedly asked to lead a printing operation with roughly 175 employees after managing a much smaller team. He suddenly found himself between an entrepreneurial culture and a corporate parent focused on quarterly performance. Looking back, he says he made “a lot of mistakes,” particularly around people decisions and compensation changes, yet the experience became one of his most formative leadership chapters, Thorell tells us.
Read MoreThe printing business became its own classroom. He encountered operations where overtime was uncontrolled, jobs were mispriced, and employees were highly skilled craftspeople with limited exposure to financial concepts, Thorell tells us. His task was not simply to improve margins, but to build understanding without damaging quality or morale.
Today, at Benetrends Financial, he brings that same cross-functional mindset to helping entrepreneurs access capital through retirement funds, SBA financing, or both. For Thorell, leadership was forged far from the spotlight—close to customers, close to owners, and close to the decisions that determine whether businesses grow or stall.
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CFOTL: What does Benetrends really do today?
Thorell: If I have five seconds with somebody, I’ll say Benetrends is a business funding company and a retirement plan administration company. That can sound unusual at first, but what we really do is help entrepreneurs gain access to capital through retirement funds, SBA financing, or a combination of both. We help clients navigate the complexities of financing, get qualified, and connect with lenders. Beyond funding, we also see ourselves as a structure and compliance company, making sure the solution holds up over time. Every source of capital comes with tradeoffs—tax implications, repayment obligations, ownership dilution, or ongoing compliance requirements. Our role is to help clients align those tradeoffs with their business goals and risk tolerance.
CFOTL: How has the business been funded and evolved over time?
Thorell: We have a very interesting origin story. In the early 1980s, our founder, Len Fisher, who is an ERISA attorney, recognized a structural gap in the market. People with retirement savings wanted to start businesses, but their options were limited to taking taxable distributions or going into debt. He realized there was a compliant way, under ERISA rules, to use retirement funds to buy stock in a company they controlled. That became what is now known as a ROBS plan. He launched Benetrends in 1983 to operationalize that structure. It was unconventional thinking at the time, and it faced scrutiny and regulatory questions, but over time it became a widely accepted funding path—especially in franchising, where it is now a primary source of capital.
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