New Position: Chief financial officer, GunnAllen Financial, Tampa
Previous Position: Chief executive, emerging markets, Spencer Trask, New York
Jed Trosper is giving his passport a rest in his new position with GunnAllen Financial.
In previous jobs, Trosper traveled up to 250,000 miles a year, venturing to Europe and the Far East. Now his workweek is more numbers and meetings.
Trosper said his new role as GunnAllen's chief financial officer for the most part is "typical of any CFO's job: financial reporting and interfacing with the public investors." Additionally, one of his early goals is to institute a new infrastructure in the growing company, "probably my No. 1 goal," Trosper said.
GunnAllen Financial, a full-service brokerage, has more than doubled in size in the past two years to more than 900 independent brokers in 161 locations in 32 states. The expansion and plans for continued growth require new financial systems and new operating systems, Trosper said.
"It's like driving a car," he said. "The more miles you put on it (and) the smaller the car is, you need to get a bigger car.
"We want to go from 1,000 reps to 2,000 and from 2,000 to 4,000. My job is to be sure we have the systems in place to do that," he said. "I'll be doing some re-engineering, and making purchases or creating new software packages and hardware."
Trosper grew up in Washington, Ind. He earned a bachelor's degree in business from Indiana University in 1977 and became a CPA in 1980. He began his career with JCPenny in an internal auditing role and moved up through the ranks at several companies over the next few years, becoming CEO of a sporting goods company in 1986.
In the early 1990s, Trosper worked with various portfolio companies with General Atlantic Partners, based in Connecticut. "I took one through bankruptcy, one I took public and one I sold to some Europeans," he recalled. "I was the guy they put into problem companies to come up with an exit strategy."
In 1997, Trosper joined St. Petersburg's Home Shopping Network as chief financial officer. Soon he was directing HSN International, first as chief operating officer, then as president. That's when the serious traveling began.
"We opened up businesses in China, Italy, Germany, Japan, all over the place," he said. "I had one of those 48-page passports that I still used up in a year. I do have a nice (passport) stamp collection."
Beginning a TV shopping network in a foreign country posed a number of challenges, Trosper said. "It's all about finding the right business partners," he said. Much of the training of foreign executives and staff was done at HSN headquarters in St. Petersburg. "We would identify people we thought had CEO talent, buying talent, production talent, and we'd partner them with someone inside HSN.
"It's the ultimate startup, and startups are difficult enough when you know the culture, laws and infrastructure," he said. For example, Trosper said, "Ninety-six percent of the things bought in this country in retail is with a charge card; it's like 4 percent in Europe. There were surprises every day."
After five years with HSN International, Trosper became chief executive of emerging markets at Spencer Trask, a New York venture capital firm. The extensive traveling continued, putting Trosper on the road domestically about 50 to 60 percent of the time, he said.
"Spencer Trask invested in big ideas," Trosper said. "My job was to wrap the business and the business process around the ideas. In essence, that's what I'm doing here (at GunnAllen Financial): Analyze the business, see where the bottlenecks are, see what needs to be done in terms of process flow and then bring those to the company."
Trosper also has been named to the board of directors to the recently created GunnAllen Foundation, a nonprofit organization that still is mapping its goals.
Trosper, 49, and his wife, Karlene, have an 11-year-old son, Connor. They live in South Tampa.
In his spare time, Trosper said he likes to coach his son's baseball team.
A recent hurricane-related injury has curtailed Trosper's baseball activities a bit. He stepped into a hole while checking out damage from Hurricane Charley and broke his wrist.
