It’s lonely at the top, especially when you’re running a cash-strapped company. As a managing partner at Aveus, a St. Paul–based strategy and operational-change consulting firm, Chris LaVictoire Mahai turned the company around by relying on what she had learned about finances while putting herself through college.
“While earning my undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in Superior, I landed a job as a medical transcriber at St. Mary’s Hospital in Duluth, where I could get all the night and double shifts I wanted.
“I could drink all the coffee I wanted for 10 cents a shift, and for 25 cents I could get a cup of soup and a sandwich. I scrimped on the basics. My backpack was from the Army Surplus store and I wore the same pair of jeans for years.
“Those lessons had been long forgotten by the time I came to Aveus in 1999. We didn’t have an [accounting] system here. Invoices went into a drawer, and when they were paid, they went into another drawer. I realized, this is like college: You can have great receivables but no cash. When I woke up to the harsh realities of my situation, I threw away my big finance ideas and went back to what I had figured out as a college kid.
“I took over as sole owner of Aveus in January 2001. Every day matters. If an invoice sat in an in box for a few extra days, it could mean missing the payment cycle of a key client and being out of the cash opportunity for another 30 or 45 days.
“I learned to share the burden. As the owner, I was stressed and lonely. Everyone looked at me like, ‘What do we do now?’ When I brought in two partners, it was really powerful. If you hold all the responsibility of managing the company’s cash position, others don’t have the context for your decisions. They don’t know there is no cash; they just think you’re being cheap.”
