Meet Brent Finlay...

Things have definitely taken a few turns since my days growing up on a farm on the Canadian Prairies.  Back then, my time was spent more breaking my back than pushing a pencil or punching keys on a computer.

I grew up as a "Flat Lander", not far from the longitudinal center of North America, and got a first hand experience in self employment in one of the most volatile industries in the world ... Agriculture.

As a farm boy, I also got to understand the order of things:  Work hard all summer so that you were allowed to play hockey all winter.

In the late 80's, massive drought hit the prairies, and there wasn't much going on, so I went to university and 5 years later came out with an under grad in Agricultural Economics and an MBA in Finance.

At that point, the region was still recovering from the drought, so I signed up to work for a National Ag lender and my first assignment was to manage a territory around Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada that had the highest number of delinquent accounts and the lowest lending in the entire province.

Next stop, the second largest grain company in Canada.

Back in the early 90's, this company was a long established co-op that had recently gone public and needed to rebuilt its $250,000,000 infrastructure and they needed to do it in a hurry or risk being overrun by the competition.

After three years of being public, the capital expansion was in full swing and basically out of control.

My job as the Capital Planner was to somehow create order out of the chaos.

3 1/2 years later, we had a detailed consolidation and capital investment strategy that was in full swing.  The rest as they say is history. The company was eventually acquired and is now part of the largest grain handling and farm inputs system in Canada.

So as things were nicely rounding into shape with the grain company, a large U.S. Multi-national Biotech Company came knocking and wanted to see if I could lend them a hand.

The challenge:  Transition from a very successful two product, operationally excellent company, to a product innovation company expected to feature hundreds of products, develop new markets, and basically turn everything upside down and inside out along the way to doubling the Canadian Business.

My job:  Keep us from blowing ourselves up.

The company had assembled an impressive array of talent from a variety of different industries to "shake up" the historical approach to business and drive the product innovation platform into the new millennium.

To say it was all a tremendous learning experience would be an understatement.

During my time there as CFO and diffuser of corporate chaos, I was involved in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, joint ventures, consolidations, IPO, restructuring, product launches, capital expansion, and so on. I also got to experience burnout, divorce, and all the other not so pleasant things that come from working way too hard for a master who always has more for you to do.

The company also achieved the expected growth and success through developing and launching new products with state of the art technology. Much of what we did was precedent setting in the industry and created several landmark court rulings with respect to the future sale of biotech products in Canada.