Back in August 2022, when Cardinal Health, Inc.’s finance chief, Jason Hollar, succeeded CEO Mike Kaufmann as the healthcare giant’s top executive, among the immediate challenges facing new CEO Hollar was filling the company’s CFO vacancy.
At the time, an activist investor with an eye toward management change had put in motion a strategic review of the company’s businesses, and certain members of the analyst community were speculating that the former CFO’s tenure at the top might be short-lived.
Alt credits Sara Lee’s acclaimed CEO, Brenda Barnes, with helping him to ultimately make the pivot ... [+]
Fast-forward to March 2024, as shares of Cardinal Health reached yet another 52-week high and CEO Hollar told CNBC’s Jim Cramer: “We have simplified how we do things. We’ve exited some product lines. We’ve exited some countries. We’ve done a lot of careful analysis to make sure that all of our resources are reinvested in our core business.”
To wit: What was once deemed an activist’s strategic review quickly generated what might become a management case study for driving value creation in an activist environment.
For Hollar, who had served as Cardinal’s CFO since May 2020 and previously been CFO of Tenneco, Inc., management’s bold emphasis on value creation might have been something to be expected within the wheelhouse of a veteran CFO ’s repertoire. At the very least, an experienced finance leader would likely have keen insight into who among their peers has distinguished themselves in such environs.
Enter Aaron Alt, CFO of Houston-based commercial food distributor Sysco Corp., who with little healthcare experience to speak of edged out other competition to become Cardinal’s new finance chief in January 2023.
Prior to joining Sysco, Alt had held various executive positions at Sara Lee (8 years), Target (6 years), and beauty retailer Sally Beauty, where he served as president and CFO for 2 years, starting in October 2018. Still, unlike the case with many of his CFO peers, Alt’s job titles and promotions fail to expose the breadth of his corporate finance career. From his earliest days roaming corporate corridors, Alt has benefited from what evades most finance career-builders for decades: boardroom access.
“My role, regardless of title, regardless of company, has inevitably been that of problem-solver. I’m a fixer. I’m a ‘go get it done’ sort of guy,” comments Alt, who in 2004 was a partner in London’s Kirkland & Ellis law firm when Sara Lee invited him to join their legal team as the company sought to buttress its M&A ambitions with plus-size legal acumen.
“One of the benefits of being a lawyer at Kirkland is that they are great at teaching you how to put forth an executive presence, which I think was a major factor in affording me widespread access and providing me with the ability to get the job done while supporting the board and executive teams,” explains Alt, who joined the food company as its management was contemplating breaking the company up into many pieces.
“I soon moved into the strategy side to help to chart the business’s path going forward—but always with an eye toward where the value creation would be coming from,” he continues. “Would it be from natural evolution or M&A?”
Alt credits Sara Lee’s acclaimed CEO, Brenda Barnes, with helping him to ultimately make the pivot toward finance.
“When she knocked on my door to ask me to be the division CFO at Sara Lee—in what would be my first finance leadership position—no one was more surprised than me,” recalls Alt, whose reputation as a problem-solver at Sara Lee seemingly enabled him to remain “function agnostic” as he undertook other nontraditional missions such as dropping out of finance for a spell to head up marketing for one of the food company’s divisions.
At Target, Alt appears to have remained the untethered problem-solver intent on uncovering new paths to value creation.
“In each of these companies, my job—regardless of title—has always been to do an assessment of where any weaknesses might lie,” he points out. “Might someone come and do something to us? This is also what’s known as ‘activist defense.’ It’s been a focus that has always allowed me to turn over a lot of rocks to identify good things, as well as to uncover other areas where we might face challenges.”
Alt’s work at Target culminated in his appointment as CEO of the retailer’s troubled Canadian operations. Instead of abruptly abandoning the Canadian market, though, he helped to champion a more thoughtful exit strategy to protect the retailer’s brand, employees, suppliers, and landlords. This involved the unique approach of navigating the Canadian subsidiary through bankruptcy with support from the parent company.
“This was one of the hardest working experiences that I've had,” he observes. “It has stuck with me as I have thought about other business problems since then. You really keep an eye on the fact that at the end of the day, it's not just about the numbers, it's about the team. It's about strategy. It's about all of the stakeholders and how all of these pieces fit together.”
Back at Cardinal Health, as the strategy review gained steam, Trish English, the firm’s chief accounting officer, would serve as interim CFO for 4 months while management canvassed industry for a finance leader with a track record in activist defense—aka someone who would turn over a lot of rocks.
It appears obvious now that Cardinal has found just such a CFO.
Says Alt: “The Cardinal team has an incredible amount of change under way. I like to say that we've instituted 5 years of change in 18 months.”
