689: Be the Bridge | Terry Coelho, CFO, BioDelivery Sciences International (BDSI)

Within 4 months of her 2019 arrival inside BDSI’s CFO office, Terry Coelho had spearheaded a product acquisition and managed a successful equity raise—two finance milestones that would produce generous sales tailwinds for the specialty pharmaceutical firm.

BDSI would experience 100% net sales growth in 2019, followed by 40% net sales growth in 2020. Such sales momentum recently led BDSI to issue a press release praising its “new commercial team” and at the same time announcing that Coelho’s CFO title would now include the designation “executive vice president.”

For Coelho, a seasoned finance executive who spent more than a decade serving in a variety of senior positions inside Novartis and Sealed Air Corp., the call to leadership at BDSI afforded her a wide berth from which deliver results that are now arguably visible to all.

Still, even this success chapter must compete for our attention when we hear about a promotion that she received from candy and pet food giant Mars Incorporated early in her career. At the time, when Coelho was in her early 30s she was asked by John Mars (currently chairman) to relocate to South America and build a plant to start up Mars’s confectionery business in Brazil.

“When the plant concept was coming about, John Mars said to me, ‘You can do this job,’ and I kind of looked at him and thought to myself, ‘Why not?,’” says Coelho, who had first gotten her FP&A acumen noticed inside the corporate planning function of Mars’s McLean, Virginia, headquarters.

Years later, as she prepared to return to the U.S., the Brazilian team presented her with a photo of the former cow pasture that the Mars plant was then occupying. After a number of expansions, the factory and Brazilian business operations under Coelho’s leadership had grown to provide jobs to 200 people.

“I don’t think that most companies would have given someone with my experience—at that point in my career—that kind of an opportunity. It has really shaped whom I’ve become. I have a breadth of experience from having run an entire business, and when you build it, you know it even better,” explains Coelho, who, after returning to the U.S., would hold a number of strategic finance positions, including CFO of Mars Direct, a newly formed direct-to-consumer business unit that would establish itself as one of the company’s future growth engines. –Jack Sweeney

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