Meet Brent Finlay
Hi ... and thanks for spending some time on
this site.
Here's where you get
to learn a little bit about me and how I came to building this site and
working with business financing.
 Things
have definitely taken a few turns since my days growing up on a farm on the
Canadian Prairies. Back then, my time was spent more breaking my back
than pushing a pencil.
I grew up as a "Flat Lander", not far from the longitudinal center of North
America, and got a first hand experience in self
employment in one of the most volatile industries in the world, Agriculture.
As a farm boy, I also
got to understand the order of things: Work hard all summer so that
you were allowed to play hockey all winter.
In the late 80's,
massive drought hit the prairies, and there wasn't much going on, so I went
to university and 5 years later came out with an under grad in Agricultural
Economics and an MBA in Finance.
At that point, the
region was just recovering from the drought, so I became an Ag lender and my
first assignment was a
Territory around Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada with the highest number of
delinquent accounts and the lowest lending in the province.
Within two
years, the overdue accounts became the lowest in the province and the
lending the highest.
Whether I fully
realized it or not at the time, my career as a finance based reorganization
expert and professional trouble shooter (I sarcastically refer to myself as a mopper) had begun.
 Next
stop, the third largest grain company in Canada.
Back in the early
90's, this company was a long established co-op that had recently went
public and now needed to rebuilt its $250,000,000 infrastructure from the
public funding raised and they needed to do it in a hurry or risk being
overrun by the competition.
After three years of
being public, the capital expansion was in full swing and basically out of
control.
My job: Just Fix
It.
3 1/2 years later, we
had a detailed consolidation and capital investment strategy that was in
full swing. The rest as they say is history. The company is now the
largest grain handling and farm inputs supplier in Canada.
So as things were
nicely rounding into shape with the grain company, a large U.S.
Multi-national Biotech Company came knocking and wanted to see if I could
lend them a hand.
The challenge:
Transition from a very successful two product, operationally excellent
company, to a product innovation company expected to feature hundreds of
products, develop new markets, and basically turn everything upside down and
inside out along the way to doubling the Canadian Business.
My job: Keep us
from blowing ourselves up.
The company had
assembled a impressive array of talent from a variety of industries to
"shake up" the historical approach to business and drive the product
innovation platform into the new millennium.
Even though I was
hired be the finance lead and effectively the CFO for the Canadian Business,
the first day I was on the job I was given operations, and soon after
customer service. It just got better and better after that.
While my new peers were out shaking things up, I had to develop a support
and control system around what they were doing and clean up their messes
along the way with about 1% of their available resources.
To make things even more interesting, I added to my 70+ hour a week
existence by enrolling into the CMA accelerated program for business
professionals which was all weekend, every second weekend, for 10 months.
It was a very
interesting time to say the least. Never before had I worked in a
company where everyone had a type AAA+ personality, where each individual
was completely driven to succeed and had never really known failure to any
great extent.
It made for a very
interesting mix.
To say it was all a
tremendous learning experience would be an understatement. During my
time there as finance lead and diffuser of corporate chaos, I was involved
in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, consolidations, IPO,
restructuring, product launches, capital expansion, and so on. I also
got to experience burnout, divorce, and all the other not so pleasant things
that come from working way too hard for a master who always had more for you
to do.
The company also
achieved the expected growth and success through developing and launching
new products with state of the art technology. Much of what we did was
precedent setting in the industry and created several landmark rulings with
respect to the future sale of biotech products in Canada.
In my last 2 years with the company, I went full circle and got to sit at
the other side of the table leading up strategic planning and business
development. My last assignment was to complete a national
restructuring of the Canadian organization and in the process I restructured
myself out of the company.
It was time for a
break.
It took me about a
year to decompress and get back to planet earth from my sometimes surreal
corporate experience.
What a wild ride it
was. Like most things in life, it was a mix of the good and the bad
but overall an amazing learning experience that I will always be able to
draw from.
Since that time, I
moved to Eastern Canada and set up shop as a financing consultant, working
with companies in need of assistance with financing, business development,
and strategic planning.
As I surveyed the
market, I noticed an incredible lack of relevant information on the subject
of business financing, so it became obvious that I needed to start spending
the time necessary to develop an information based web site.
This website is an
extension of my overall approach to educate my visitors and customer about
business financing.
It will continue to
grow with content as time goes by.
While I will always
have a strong passion for business financing, it is now firmly balanced off
with the passion I have for my new family who will remain front and center
in my life.
All the best to you
and your business ventures.
Brent Finlay
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