In the world of finance, where leadership roles await those who distinguish themselves along a select number of familiar paths, Aaron Alt’s journey to becoming a CFO stands out for its breadth and depth, transcending conventional boundaries.
Starting in law, Alt quickly found his groove inside the legal world’s cornucopia of M&A advisory services. It was here where he would realize the potency of focusing beyond legal parameters—a habit that would spur a pivotal shift in his career from emphasizing legal details to prioritizing relationships and financial strategy.
From the trenches of M&A advisory to the executive suites of public companies, Alt tells us, his foundational philosophy has always revolved around the relentless pursuit of shareholder value creation—a mission that involves uncovering hidden opportunities and fortifying against potential threats.
Read More“It’s allowed me to look under a lot of rocks,” Alt reflects, underscoring his commitment to safeguarding and nurturing corporate value. It’s just such devotion that 15 months ago led him to step into the CFO office at healthcare giant Cardinal Health.
Alt joined the healthcare company shortly after Cardinal had welcomed a larger and more diverse board as the result of an agreement with an activist investor firm. As part of a broader turnaround plan, Alt’s expertise is now expected to be instrumental in navigating the challenges and opportunities ahead at Cardinal, underlining the company’s readiness to embrace change and foster growth for all stakeholders. To date, a comprehensive self-review of the healthcare giant’s business remains ongoing.
“We’re very focused on making sure that we are generating cash flow everywhere that we can—and we believe that if we’re consistent in our strategy and clear on our metrics for success, we can get a lot of things done together,” comments Alt, who during our discussion also offers up a strategic lesson from his tenure at Target, specifically regarding the retailer’s decision to exit the Canadian market gracefully.
Says Alt: “This was one of the hardest working experiences that I’ve had, and its message has stuck with me even as I’ve needed to think about other business problems: You really need to keep an eye on the fact that at the end of the day, even as CFO, it’s not just about the numbers.” –Jack Sweeney
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CFOTL: Tell us about Cardinal Health … what was the opportunity that you saw and how did it lead you to join the company?
Alt: Let me give you some background, and then I’ll talk a little bit about coming to the company. We like to believe that Cardinal Health is the biggest company that no one’s ever heard of. We’re based in Dublin, in central Ohio. We view ourselves as a start-up even though we have a multi-decade history. Our founder is still in the community and involved with the company in several ways. We’re a Fortune 20 company. We drive a lot of sales, more than $200 billion in revenue. We’re a distributor of pharmaceutical products across the U.S., both branded and generic, and we’re an international manufacturer and distributor of medical products, both our own and those of third parties. We also provide healthcare services. For me, this was a really cool ecosystem to learn about because we operate in a highly regulated industry that depends on the state, or even the country, in which we are operating, distributing, or producing to establish the standards under which we are doing so.
Read MoreThis has presented a complex problem set, which is what I really like about the experiences at Cardinal that I have had thus far. I also like the mission that the company has. At Cardinal Health, we view ourselves as essential to healthcare. What we talk about during the day is the support that we’re giving to the patients in their environment. Indeed, my own family has felt the Cardinal Health presence as we’ve navigated our own healthcare journeys. So, I now have this great opportunity to solve naughty problems in a highly regulated, complex environment. But I must say that I feel good about what I and my team do every day because we are core to improving and streamlining the healthcare experience.
Why did I come here? Besides what I’ve mentioned before, I saw from the outside a couple of enticing things about Cardinal that helped me to decide to join the company as CFO.
The first of these was that I could see a new management team in place, with a new leader, Jason Hollar, who impressed the heck out of me. It was clear to me that they were in it to win it, that they knew that we were number three in the industry, that they wanted to be number one, and that they had a path that they wanted to go down on which I could provide some help with regard to solving problems. So, I was attracted to come to the Cardinal Health team from that perspective.
I was also attracted by the complexity of the problem set, by the breadth of the business. For someone like me, this is like giving me candy relative to really being interested in what I’m doing every day. And when you’re going through such a significant transformation, which is what Jason was leading the team through, you have to make sure that you have access to the right resources, which was certainly the case.
Cardinal Health has been very, very well run from a balance sheet perspective, so I knew—or, well, I thought—as an outsider: Here is a great, winning team. So, with a transformation under way and complex problems to solve, I understood that we had a strong balance sheet that would give us the resources to go get things done. The good news for me, having been here some 15 months or so, is that the three things that I thought were true from an outside perspective—great leadership, a great plan, and a great balance sheet—have proven to be the actual true inside case every day as well.
“In this job, you’re accountable for everything but responsible for very little. By myself, I can’t make things change, so it’s working with the broader teams. It’s understanding ‘How can I provide resources, how can I provide guidance?’ This is really what the CFO role is these days. It’s ‘How can I help to influence the solutions to the problems that we’re trying to solve?’ And this is much more about influence than about being direct.” –Aaron Alt, CFO, Cardinal Health
Cardinal Health | www.cardinalhealth.com | Dublin OH