Leadership + communication + critical thinking = Problem solved.
Joseph Krolczyk
Founder & Executive Managing Director
Joe Krolczyk is Founder and Executive Managing Director of Tartan Advisors LLC. Joe provides business strategy, finance, and technology guidance to help clients achieve competitive advantage through impactful solutions and insights. His business areas of focus include CFO Services, Technology, and Profitable Growth serving public, private, and not-for-profit organizations. Joe has demonstrated experience in business and finance strategy, technology, cloud adoption, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring, analytics, cost reduction, and program management.
Prior to starting-up Tartan Advisors, Joe held Managing Director and senior leadership roles for 20 years in business consulting with Arthur Andersen, Deloitte Consulting, and KPMG. He is well recognized by colleagues for providing keen cutting-edge insights driving bottom-line results. Below are some highlights of Joe’s business experiences:
CFO Services
Business Strategy - The company recently completed its split into two publicly traded entities. Prior to the split, Joe helped the client with the comprehensive design of strategic metrics and process indicators to analytically drive improved business performance. The achievement of the KPI strategy along with operational improvements justified a $1B new investment in the business.
Advanced Analytics - A consumer packaged goods client was seeking a global decision support solution to enable a decentralized operating model. Joe worked with the client to develop an integrated solution providing improved reporting and drill-down for category, channel, region, accountability, and statutory reporting thereby enabling global comparability of financial information. Training and solution delivery occurred on five continents.
Global Accounting Policies and Procedures - The client desired to improve its commercial quality and adhere to tightening regulatory requirements. Joe helped by leading the design and re-writing of 60 accounting policies and procedures, created a web-based training program, and conducted in-person training in China, Brazil, Mexico, Europe, and the U.S.
Treasury / Cash Flow - Joe redesigned the process and managed $80M in cash transactions daily between company’s financing arm, dealership network, and banks.
Technology
Cloud Advisory - The CEO’s ambition was to eliminate legacy IT systems and transform the business to the cloud environment. Joe helped by designing a comprehensive operating model solution and detailed roadmap to redirect IT spending to a modern cloud-based environment, developing functional and technical requirements, guiding cloud partner evaluations, and advising the C-Suite on its ultimate cloud selection of Oracle to replace legacy systems.
Financial Systems - The organization with many profit centers was seeking an executable finance solution centered on using SAP to take finance work out of its operations. Joe helped lead the program and initiated the solution design with a 3-day executive strategy session to align expectations among senior operations, finance, and IT leadership. Detailed workshops to redesign finance operational processes followed.
Profitable Growth
International Expansion - The client targeted major investments in China and Southeast Asia. Joe met with senior business and finance executives to establish expectations for operations and identify financial regulatory requirements. He led the program design to address immediate risks/needs and created detailed business charters to drive steady program progress. First year profit improvement of $27 million was achieved.
Merger Integration - The automotive client needed to integrate an $8 billion acquisition with 23 manufacturing facilities into the company’s organization. Joe advised the deal finance lead and client executive team in preparation for final negotiations and led development of Service Level Agreements for all finance activities. Joe designed the finance operating model and the new 250 person finance organization in advance of Day 1.
Exit Strategy CFO Preparation - A rapidly growing start-up was seeking to scale its finance capabilities to support exit strategy plans. Joe advised the CFO on reporting options and helped the CIO and Controller advance Oracle adoption to achieve process efficiencies. The business was sold for $3B.
Joe earned his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and his undergraduate accounting degree from Lebanon Valley College. Joe has finance and accounting certifications as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Certified Public Accountant (CPA), and a technology certification for SAP FI/CO.
Wayne Chau
Wayne is a results-driven executive whose accomplishments reflect proven global business acumen, financial management and risk assessment skills. He is highly adept at managing cross-functional initiatives in complex environments. Wayne has expertise in analyzing operations and implementing effective strategies, processes and systems to improve performance. His advisory areas of focus include strategy, governance, risk management and process optimization/improvement/resiliency.
Prior to Wayne’s consulting engagements, he was Chief Financial Officer of Toshiba America, Inc. the holding company for 9 major subsidiaries and affiliates with North America sales of $10 Billion. Concurrent to his CFO role Wayne was General Manager of Toshiba’s North America Shared Service Center.
CFO Role
Led risk based innovation for further optimization of business model opportunities and institutionalized a high standard of risk management, commensurate with each business unit’s risk profile. Strengthened governance of operations mandating business performance and risk attribution for revenue results, see through profit, cash conversion and risk adjusted return on capital.
Shared Services Center General Manager Role
Led overall business re-engineering and transformation efforts creating a single shared service center from 5 independent, decentralized operational back offices. Transformation included the design, build and implementation phases and entailed standardizing F&A, IT and HR processes, establishing centers of excellence and outsourcing select operations. Business re-engineering goals were achieved and SSC solution realized improved operational efficiencies of 20% within 2 years from baseline cost of $142M. Six Sigma continuous improvement program continues to drive additional benefits.
Advisory and Consulting Role
Advising clients assisting both international and domestic entities in strategy, governance, compliance and risk management, and process optimization.
Wayne earned his MBA from Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business and his undergraduate degree from Cornell University. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and a Six Sigma Master Black Belt.
Aaron Gutnick
Aaron brings more than 17 years of Big 4 management consulting experience in organization transformation in the areas of HR, Finance, and IT, organization design, workforce planning and analytics, and change management.
Aaron’s hands-on experience spans multiple transformation projects with global organizations in the Manufacturing, Consumer, Telecommunications, Banking, and Healthcare sectors, where he led the design, development, and implementation of comprehensive organizational strategies delivering back office and shared services solutions.
Prior to joining Tartan Advisors, Aaron held senior leadership roles in business consulting with Deloitte Israel, where he led the firm’s Human Capital practice, Deloitte Consulting U.S., and Arthur Andersen. Aaron has also served in leadership roles with Deloitte in its Post-Merger Integration practice and as a senior technology innovation advisor. Below are some highlights of Aaron’s business experiences:
CFO Services
Finance Organization Strategy - A company that is a leader in the gaming and resorts industry was expanding rapidly in Asia and needed to build a finance strategy and organization that would align with the growth objectives of the company. Aaron led a strategy setting effort working with the CFO that designed the global finance organization across six dimensions: strategy, people, process, technology, organization, and culture.
Talent Management - For a large tier-1 automotive supplier, Aaron and his team customized a talent management and leadership development framework at the request of the CEO to augment his evaluation of internal and external candidates for the role of CFO. A comprehensive evaluation on cultural fit and leadership capabilities was performed examining each candidate. The effort directly led to the CEO’s selection of a new CFO, development of additional key finance positions reporting to the CFO, and a detailed 90-day transformation process to assimilate the new leader into the CFO role.
Technology
ERP Implementation - A startup in the telecommunications industry was growing exponentially and the executive leadership team decided to implement Oracle for financials, HR and supply chain. Aaron led a team that designed the key finance processes, mapped the requirements into Oracle, and harmonized disparate data that expanded the client’s reach and presence around the world.
Change Management - Aaron led talent and change management activities for the establishment of a shared services center for a major bank, including implementation of multiple new systems. The program entailed centralizing all back office and administrative processing activities out of branch offices into a centralized location. Key responsibilities included leading the full talent, people and change components for the SSC solution.
Profitable Growth
Post-Merger Integration - Aaron led change management efforts for a global post-merger integration for a large technology company. Aaron managed communications, training, and capability development for all impacted stakeholders. Business activities involved new processes, tools, and systems in a shared services environment.
Business Strategy - An agricultural producer and distributer needed to define a sales and distribution strategy to expand the business. Aaron advised the CEO on the organizational and financial implications of several growth options, evaluated cross-border risks and opportunities, and helped define the selected governance model.
Analytics - A global automotive manufacturer decided to establish an analytics function to make better analytically supported business decisions using multiple sources of data. Aaron led the team in the design and development of the analytics function and the build of its functional strategy, talent components, processes, technology, organization, and the supporting culture.
Aaron earned both his MBA and BBA from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. Aaron has passed the CPA exam in the state of Illinois.
Jonathan Smith
Jonathan provides technology strategy and leadership with a track record of helping clients find, develop, and implement innovative technology solutions to solve business challenges. His business areas of focus include CIO services, technology, and information management. Jonathan has demonstrated experience in business and technology strategy, cloud adoption, data management, transformation, operational improvement, analytics, cost reduction, optimization, and program management.
Jonathan has held director and senior leadership roles for 15 years in business consulting and industry with KPMG, Noah Consulting, and Chesapeake Energy. Jonathan is well recognized by colleagues for developing relevant technology strategy, enterprise architecture, and information management operating models that achieve business results. Highlights of Jonathan’s business experiences include:
Technology
Digital Business Strategy - Jonathan helped a large company develop a new IT strategy to balance the needs of a complex legacy environment with the demands of becoming a digital business. Jonathan worked with leadership to combine IT financial, operational, and architecture analysis and developed a complete plan and road map to affordably become a digitally ready enterprise.
Cloud IT Strategy - Jonathan led a team in the development of an IT Strategy at a large transportation organization. The strategy entailed analysis of technology architecture, operational effectiveness, benchmarks, and financial analysis. The outcome was a 3-year road map to transform the company into an agile and digitally enabled organization by increasing use of cloud solutions and retirement of customized on premise solutions.
Enterprise Performance Management - A services company had explosive growth and was staged for further expansion and a future IPO. Executive management relied on slow manually intensive processes to receive key performance metrics on the operations of the business. Jonathan successfully developed an enterprise performance management strategy determining the information needs to effectively run the business and deliver key performance metrics to the executives.
Production accounting - The operations department of a large company required a new reporting solution. The existing manual process took multiple days with little insight. Using enterprise data warehouse architecture, Jonathan led a team to create an integrated process to report key performance metrics of the business to support operational reporting. The new operations accounting foundation was built to expand with new business requirements including volumetric payments, joint ventures, acquisitions, and divestitures.
CFO Services
Financial Reporting and Advanced Analytics - A large independent oil & gas company was seeking an integrated reporting and analytics solution for strategic, managerial, and operational decision making. Jonathan worked with the company leaders to develop an integrated data warehouse and data delivery solution providing accurate and extendable data analytics. The solution for thousands of users provided a KPI dashboard, insights, and comparable analysis across divisions and regions for operational and financial metrics.
Financial Projects Accounting - A large mining company was seeking a solution to simplify its project accounting solution to manage the yearly capital budget process, financially monitor and control capital projects, and integrate the financial fixed asset master data. Jonathan helped by leading the design and writing the system process re-design and conducted training, transition planning, and implementation of the new solution.
Jonathan earned a degree from Oral Roberts University in computer science.
Maureen Londino
Senior Advisor
Maureen Londino is Founder and Principal of the Londino Group, established in 2004. She was previously a Partner with Ernst & Young LLP, leading the Human Capital practice in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, New York and West Virginia; and earlier was a Principal at Buck Consultants and Mercer HR Consulting.
With over 25 years of consulting experience, Maureen is known for successful engagements and long-term, collaborative client relationships. She works closely and carefully with the client to develop objectives, guiding principles and a work plan that is detailed, yet flexible. This planning is designed to keep the project on-time and on-track, providing the basis for ongoing communications with all project stakeholders and project success.
Her areas of expertise are: benefit planning, employee/benefit cost optimization, merger due diligence and post-merger integration, paid time off conversions and employee communications. Her approach focuses on achieving the employer’s human resource and cost objectives, while delivering maximum value to employees.
Human Capital
Benefits Strategy and Planning - comprehensive and affordable program design, competitive benchmarking and best practices, pricing and cost analysis, paid time off conversion.
Vendor Choice and Management - Request for Proposal development, selection process and implementation for all benefit programs as well as FMLA and absence management, wellness and benefit administration systems.
Mergers and Acquisitions - Assist in day one readiness support by conducting benefit program due diligence, benefit integration and complex project management.
Population and Health Management - Strategies for the health of the overall workforce through wellness program design, health promotion, and disease management.
Employee Communications - Customized communications process to gather employee perspectives and communication plans for change such as, focus groups, surveys, handbooks, newsletters, FAQs, presentations and open enrollment support.
Project Management - Guide projects and program implementation through developing, monitoring and refining of detailed work plans, coordinating and managing resources and vendors, meeting and schedule management, and project evaluation against goals and metrics.
Maureen earned her Bachelor of Science degree in business administration from Duquesne University, completed the Harvard Executive Program and is a Pennsylvania-licensed insurance broker.