New position: President, Bennett Consulting Services, Clearwater; Previous position: Chief financial officer, PSCU Financial Services, St. Petersburg.
By FRED W. WRIGHT JR.
Published June 2, 2003
Though financial scandals involving major corporations such as WorldCom have changed the economic landscape, Betsy Bennett nonetheless has followed through with her plan to launch a one-woman consulting service in the Tampa Bay area.
She seeks to provide CFO-type services to small corporations, those with $10-million or so in revenue, which don't yet have a chief financial officer, and more strategic, focused consulting services to larger corporations, those with revenues of $50-million or greater.
"For companies that don't have their own CFO, they may need partially those services of a CFO," Bennett said.
For larger corporations, where a CFO is part of upper management, Bennett said she can provide more specific consulting, particularly for companies with multiple products. "One of the projects I'm working on is helping a company understand the profitability of a multiple product line," she said.
"Usually, corporations have a good understanding of their overall profitability," she said, but "many times they have not delved deeper than the overall global profitability" and fail to look at the profitability of distinct product lines.
Bennett said she has always had an affinity for numbers and analysis. Before opening her consulting firm in Clearwater, she was CFO with PSCU Financial Services in St. Petersburg for nearly a decade. Before PSCU, she was with Ernst & Young for 10 years, first in Iowa, then in the Tampa Bay area.
Her new business is targeting corporations in the service and manufacturing industries, she said. "In the service side, particularly, if they are offering more than one service, there usually is not a system to distinguish profitability," she said. "In manufacturing, smaller companies still have a need for analysis."
When she began planning to start a consulting service, Bennett said, the nation's economic atmosphere was quite different.
"When I decided to do this, it was before WorldCom, so the economic climate I was anticipating was very different from the one I ended up with," she said. "With the heightened sensitivity around financial issues, I'm not sure whether it's better or worse than what I anticipated, but it's different."
Bennett earned a bachelor's degree in accounting from the University of Iowa in 1981 and, after moving to Tampa Bay, earned a master's degree in accountancy from the University of South Florida in 1984.
"I've always been in the financial arena," she said. "Numbers talk to me. I just have a sense for them.
"I have a very analytical mind. It's just been a language I've always understood and been good at - numbers and analysis, (but) more so analysis than numbers."
Bennett is on the board of directors of Junior Achievement of West Central Florida, a position she accepted while at PSCU. "It's an organization that very much goes along (with) my beliefs," she said. "It serves children. It teaches them free enterprise, and, hopefully, somewhere along the way, it teaches them to love business.
"They service all strata of children, from kindergarten all the way up through high school," she said.
Bennett, 43, lives in Clearwater with her husband, Scott Arndt, and their two children, 9 and 3.
