902: Finding Your Fire | Celeste Ackert, CFO, Fairmarkit

Of all of the places future CFOs could have been employed in the late 1990s, the printing division of RR Donnelley might seem to have been among the least likely.

However, it’s important to note that this period predated the wide deployment of EDGAR, the database system that electronically automates the collection, validation, and acceptance of financial documents by the government’s SEC division.

Hence the printing division of marketing communications giant RR Donnelley remained one of the country’s largest hubs of activity surrounding the creation, printing, and submittal of financial documents.

“For time-sensitive documents, there would be a deadline to be met each afternoon in order to enable documents to be flown and then hand-couriered to the SEC’s offices,” recalls Celeste Ackert, who tells us that in order to better accommodate any clients who might drop by, the office space that she occupied with others featured a half-door whose bottom was closed and top always open.

For Ackert, who had become an eagle-eyed project manager inside Donnelley’s printing bullpen, the endless flow of financial documents served to satisfy a growing operations appetite before morphing into a portal from which to observe future career possibilities.

“I would be flipping through these SEC documents and thinking to myself, ‘You know what?—perhaps I’d like to see myself in a prospectus someday,’” remarks Ackert, who after 6 years of serving Donnelley clients segued into a series of corporate finance jobs first by leveraging her printing operations expertise and subsequently by climbing the ranks as an FP&A all-star.

Before leaving Donnelley, Ackert—much to her credit—decided to balance her “prospectus ambitions” with some added ballast for the journey ahead: an MBA degree.

Comments Ackert: “I wasn’t really certain how I was going to get there, but these two things equipped me with some fire.” –Jack Sweeney