Earlier this week, I attended the Denver Business Journal CFO of the Year luncheon, along with Linhart PR Partner and CFO Carri Clemens and colleagues Chandra Brin and Dina Storz.  Carri was a finalist for the second consecutive year.  Here’s hoping the third time’s the charm.

Winning CFOs in several categories were honored, including small business, public company and not-for-profit .  The stories of their accomplishments were a great reminder of the vital role CFOs play in helping to build businesses.  The best of them – what my smart management consulting colleagues back at A.T. Kearney used to call “the strategic CFO” – are so much more than managers of the finance function.

Carri exemplifies this, in ways that benefit our team, our clients and our firm.  She provides high-quality financial statements and forecasts that enable our partner team to be clear on where we are, and where we’re going.  Her annual budgets are uncannily accurate (although somehow she always can find a little extra to help reward our team with a special treat).  Her monthly presentations of high-level P&L data and trends help our staff understand what drives our business.

But these responsibilities don’t begin to encompass the value Carri brings to Linhart PR.  She manages our annual client satisfaction and employee satisfaction surveys and helps us understand and act on the results.  She serves as chief technology officer, chief HR officer and a kind, compassionate and wise counselor anytime one of us needs a listening ear.  Most important, she gives smart, insightful, fact-based advice whenever we have an important business decision to make.

And she does it all with warmth, humor and grace, while balancing her responsibilities here with those of a wife and mother of two great kids.

We’re very fortunate to have Carri as our CFO and a partner in our firm.  To us, she’s the CFO of the Millennium.  Time to start working on that acceptance speech for next year.