About
Guillermo Birmingham
A CPA who spent twenty-six years certifying whether units were ready before anything depended on it. The question has not changed. What is being certified is now a company.
About
A CPA who spent twenty-six years certifying whether units were ready before anything depended on it. The question has not changed. What is being certified is now a company.
The through-line
Twenty-six years in the Air Force, retired as a Colonel. A great deal of that work came down to one question asked before anything irreversible happened. Is this ready, and how do you know?
That question does not change when the subject is a company. What changes is who gets to ask it. When an owner sells, it is asked by people working for the buyer or the lender, at the point where the answer can no longer be improved.
My job is to ask it first, while the answer is still yours to change.
Then the numbers
A CPA, and a career spent running the business side of organizations that were busy doing something else.
In the Air Force I finished as chief financial officer of a two billion dollar hospitality enterprise. After that, a global development organization with a large and unusually entrepreneurial microfinance practice. Then the Americas regional office of a multilateral health agency, running finance, technology, procurement and human resources across more than thirty countries. Then senior vice president for finance and administration at another global organization. Then a partnership in a national CFO advisory firm, with the Washington metro region.
The through-line is not the sector. In every one of those jobs I was the person answerable for whether the numbers, and the operations behind them, would hold up when somebody examined them. Auditors, member states, boards, donors. A buyer asks the same question, with more money riding on it and less time to fix whatever the examination turns up.
What the work looks like
The company had oversight that was thin rather than absent, which is normal at that size. The measures that actually mattered only became obvious once I had learned the business, so I built them: the reporting that did not exist, monthly for management, quarterly at board level, and the coordination across the accounting firm, the M&A firm and the attorney.
That is the shape of the work more often than not. A diagnosis first, then the measurement, then several years of moving the number before anyone goes anywhere near a transaction.
The clearest thing I know about timing
He had two million dollars on the table. I told him that if he had time he could do better, and we spent that time working on the business rather than marketing it. The stake eventually sold to a publicly traded company for more than ten times the original offer.
The multiple is not the lesson. The lesson is that he had the time and chose to use it. An owner twelve months out, holding the same offer, has a different set of options and every one of them is worse.
The name
It is where I am from. I wanted the firm to carry a name that meant something to me rather than one assembled out of the same handful of words every advisory firm uses.
On a clear day, from the summit, you can see the Pacific on one side and the Atlantic on the other.
Credentials and affiliations
Engagements are conducted in English or Spanish.
Bring what you have and what you are thinking about. If a sale is years away, that is the right time to be having this conversation rather than the wrong one.