About Reside
Company Size: <150 employees
Industry: Commercial Real Estate and Technology
Products + Services: Ascent CFO Solutions’ Interim CFO and Controller Services
Reside Worldwide, Inc. is the leading provider of professionally operated and managed global alternative accommodations with a portfolio of premier hospitality brands including Manhattan’s The Beekman Tower, Rochester MN’s Broadway Plaza, Puget Sound based ABODA by Reside and furnished private military accommodation provider OnBase Suites. Additionally Reside provides technology to the managed global accommodations marketplace with end-to-end technology management platform 3Sixty.
The Task and Challenges
Reside’s senior management team contacted Ascent CFO Solutions as they were preparing to make changes to their finance and accounting teams in 2023. Reside faced multiple complex challenges including:
Leadership: The need for an Interim CFO to quickly assume leadership onsite in Reside’s Bellevue, WA offices.
Operational Excellence: Leadership and execution for critical tasks such as board and investor reporting, bank reporting and partnering with Deloitte’s audit & tax consultants.
Talent Advisory: Interviewing and vetting permanent CFO replacement candidates as well as filling open headcount and backfills of recently departed employees.
The Solutions
This project was staffed by Ascent CFO experts Paul Harrison (Interim CFO) and Diane Georgia (Interim Controller). Paul, Diane and the Ascent CFO support team worked closely with Reside’s senior management team to plan this engagement to ensure a seamless transition. One element that was important to Reside was that Paul and Diane be initially onsite once a month at their Bellevue, WA offices full time. Ascent CFO provides onsite services and was happy to accommodate.
Once arriving in Bellevue, Diane and Paul got to work.
1. Leadership
Upon the start of the engagement, the finance & accounting department at Reside had experienced over 300% turnover in staff in the prior year. This presented multiple operational and cultural challenges for Diane and Paul. From a practical standpoint, this meant there was almost no historical or tenured knowledge within the organization regarding key processes or previous decisions. The few staff that remained weren’t comfortable speaking up about problems because of the department’s previous culture.
Diane and Paul had a big challenge ahead of them to help the current staff feel empowered in their roles so they could do their best work. On day one, daily problem solving meetings were implemented with the leaders of the treasury, accounting and FP&A (Financial Planning and Analysis) functions. These meetings were supplemented with individual meetings to deep dive on specific challenges. Additionally, Paul and Diane worked with other departmental leaders to improve the frayed communications between those departments and the finance and accounting department. This involved constant monitoring of email and messages to provide quick feedback when questions arose. Finally, praise and recognition became part of the norm to encourage the team to stick together.
2. Operational Excellence
There was a laundry list of critical processes and tasks that needed to be addressed by the Ascent CFO team.
Forecasting: Reside’s Board of Directors had a forecast that did not align to the bottom up forecasting prepared by the FP&A team. Paul worked with the FP&A team to provide a single source of truth forecast for executive management.
Investor Reporting: Investor reports were constantly late and lacked consistency. Previous reports contained errors and didn’t tie back into the previous and current year’s numbers.
Annual Financial Audit: Ascent CFO partnered with Deloitte to conduct Reside’s annual financial audit. To bring the audit to completion, Diane worked with the team to reconcile all balance sheet accounts and propose a long list of adjustments in order to correctly state the financial position at 3/31/2024 (year end). This needed to be done to obtain a clean opinion from the auditors and allow the staff to start the new year with accurate accounts.
NetSuite: Reside had implemented NetSuite in April 2023 and the transition to this new system caused a lot of stress for the team. Diane worked with the team to ensure their policies worked well with NetSuite.
Banking Relationships: Paul took the lead on working with Reside’s banking partners. Paul walked the bankers through the transition and established regular reporting, communication and management of lines of credit.
Balance Sheets: There had been no reconciliation of the company’s balance sheets since the previous year’s audit.
Tax Returns: Reside’s tax returns were due just 8 weeks after the project began. Diane worked closely with Reside’s in-house team as well as Deloitte consultants to get all of the data ready so taxes could be filed on time. Additionally, Ascent CFO supported Reside in their 2022 and 2023 German VAT returns.
Bank Audit: Reside was past due on their semi-annual bank audit from KeyBank. Diane worked with the team and completed the audit to Key’s satisfaction.
Accounts Payable: The existing AP team was not performing at the highest level. Cash had not been reconciled for months and the existing team needed guidance on how to complete this task. Diane worked with the existing team to develop a streamlined approach to reconcile cash before the audit began. This entailed backdating Accounts Payable transactions to the period in which they were incurred, booking journal entries to remove the effects of the changes and then pushing the transactions into the current reporting period for reconciliation.
Vendor Reconciliations: There were three large-scale vendors who all claimed Reside owed them significant sums of money at the start of the engagement. Because there was not a process or clear historical records in Accounts Payable, Reside had the challenging task of validating each claim individually to determine if they did in fact owe on any given invoice and communicate with each vendor. Diane worked with one of the vendors directly and supported the team for the other two vendors. This entailed regular communication with the vendor to assure that their statements were being worked on since they had not been communicated with for months prior.
3. Talent Advisory
Talent Advisory services are key to many Ascent CFO engagements, including the Reside engagement. Ascent CFO offers full talent advisory services including recruitment, screening, interviewing and offer package creation to clients. In this case, Ascent CFO supported Reside on two fronts; the first being the staffing of the Reside accounting and finance department. The second being the search for the next Reside in-house CFO to take over at the end of the Ascent CFO engagement.
Staffing the Team
When Ascent CFO began working with Reside, there had been significant turnover in addition to multiple open roles that needed to be filled with qualified staff. Paul and Diane proposed to the executive team an updated organization structure for the finance and accounting departments. Working with Reside’s HR and Recruiting teams, job descriptions were created, positions posted, interviews conducted and new team members were hired in short order.
An added layer of complexity was the resignation of the treasury manager, a senior accountant and the payroll manager shortly after the project began. This required Diane and Paul to act quickly and think creatively given the other staff members were already fully utilized. This entailed adding two other Ascent CFO resources on an interim basis and Paul/Diane absorbing some additional tasks.
In total, Paul and Diane helped Reside hire 6 net-new staff and reorganized several other existing staff into revised roles to help move the company into the future.
CFO Search
In this case, Ascent CFO partnered with Reside’s Human Resources team and an external recruiting firm to achieve the goal of hiring Reside’s next in-house CFO.
Paul was responsible for interviewing CFO candidates and providing guidance and recommendations to Reside’s senior leadership team. After interviewing numerous candidates, Reside decided to hire Dan Duryea in March 2024 to lead the finance and accounting functions of the company under Paul and Diane’s recommendation.
Here’s what Dan had to say about working with Ascent CFO:
“The Ascent CFO team provided a fresh set of eyes on our processes and procedures in an ever-changing environment and drove process improvement across the entire business. They were able to shepherd the business with a steady hand and shift the culture away from jumping from fire-drill to fire-drill while putting a focus on the long term strategy of the department and overarching company goals. I cannot say enough about our partnership with Ascent CFO and, in particular, Paul and Diane’s leadership. I highly recommend their team for not only Interim CFO and Controller level positions, but also fractional and project-based work. I look forward to partnering with Ascent CFO again in the future and have already recommended their services to several other colleagues who have been extremely impressed with their willingness to jump in and roll up their sleeves in unique situations.”
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