854: Expecting the Unexpected | Shana Veale, CFO, PharmChem

Shana Veale had been working in the Albuquerque, New Mexico, office of Arthur Andersen for only about 8 months when the 88-year-old stalwart accounting house collapsed.

Being a recent college graduate at the time, Veale tells us, she really didn’t grasp all of what the news headlines attempted to convey as the turn of events surrounding the Enron scandal unfolded.

“We began having these weekly calls internally to discuss the circumstances, but then the cuts came in May and I no longer had a job,” recalls Veale, who as a newbie accountant had little to lose when compared to those colleagues with households to support and decades of equity about to vanish.

Still, having been an eyewitness to the collapse of a firm that had once populated corporate parks and urban centers across the country, Veale found that her first career chapter would administer a lesson that many finance and accounting professionals often learn much later in their careers.

“When in business, you should always expect the unexpected” was the takeaway from Veale’s early days—which she says has come in handy at PharmChem, Inc., where roughly 18 months ago she found herself on the sidelines of a proxy fight between company management and new and old board members.

For Veale, who had served as PharmChem’s controller for the previous 3 years, “the unexpected” this time around resulted in doors being swung open rather than shut, as the victorious and newly configured board asked her to serve as CFO.

“I got lucky because I had had 3 months with the former CFO as the management teams transitioned, so I was able to gather information on the things that I just had not done before, ” remark’s Veale, who lists preparing for an upcoming audit among her top of mind, 12-month CFO priorities.

Looking back Veale observes: “I have had a lot of interesting things happen in my career, but I have found very few people who can say: ‘Oh, yes, I’ve been through that as well.’” –Jack Sweeney