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INTERVIEW PLAINS SPEAKING Sean Feast FCICM speaks to Paladin’s Steve Fox about commercial collections, Procure-to-Pay, and why ‘jack of all trades’ are overrated. STEVE Fox is an unusual man. Not because he is an American working for a commercial collections agency in the UK, although that is unusual enough. What is more unusual, however, is that Steve used to be a client of the particular agency in question, Paladin. He was so impressed with his former supplier that he has now joined the business with a mission to transform the company with additional Procure-to-Pay and consultancy services to differentiate Paladin in a busy and increasingly crowded market. Growing up in Webster City, Iowa, in the heart of the mid-west, Steve admits to being a journeyman student but a better ball player: “My main interest was sport, especially baseball (he pitched and played second base) and basketball, and while I dreamed of playing for a living, and knew it was unlikely, I still always thought I’d end up working in the sports industry, perhaps as an agent or working within one of the league franchises.” TWIN ACCOUNTANTS As it was, Steve became an accountant: “My father was one of 15, and the two youngest brothers (who were twins) were both Certified Public Accountants (CPAs). They were my motivation for majoring in accountancy at university. They looked successful, lived in a large city (Chicago), and travelled, and that drove my interest.” Steve spent four years at Iowa State University, and in the last few months of study began exploring the options available to him: “Typically you would follow one of two routes: either join one of the larger PA firms, or join a State agency, usually as an auditor. Neither route held any attraction for me; hard-core technical accounting was not where I saw myself.” To this end, Steve had a little bit of luck: “I spoke to around 30 different companies and organisations who came to campus to recruit for new talent and was offered a job.” In fact, Steve was offered two jobs. The first, with the State of Iowa, he politely declined. The second, which he accepted, was for one of the largest businesses that nobody had ever heard of: the pharmaceutical wholesale distribution giant, McKesson. “Looking back on my career, this was a super critical time in my life and explains where I am now,” he remembers, smiling. As a site controller, Steve worked in a series of distribution centres throughout the US, initially learning about the company’s systems and processes, before being sent to West Palm Beach, Florida: “I had never been to Florida before,” he laughs. “It was a small distribution centre, I was 22-years old, and had four direct reports, all of who were older than me. Until then I had been trained on systems but there was very little training around people management. I learned a great deal in a very short space of time. I learned that to be successful you needed to be able to combine technical skills with people skills if you really wanted to make a go of it.” UPWARDLY MOBILE Steve spent nine enjoyable years at McKesson, working all over the US. He moved eight times: “For a young man happy to pack a bag and go anywhere they sent you, it was a great experience,” he adds. Phoenix, Arizona was his favourite: “It’s where I met my wife,” he jokes. An opportunity to join Gateway Computers proved too tempting, as did an opportunity to move to South Dakota, closer to home. It was an exciting time to join a new business at the start of the personal computing phenomenon: “Gateway was a leader in the consumer space, and it was a relatively sexy industry. It was the mid-1990s and Apple weren’t even considered a competitor.” It was at Gateway that Steve further extended the concept of the Shared Services Centre that he’d instigated at McKesson, and became something of an expert: “Not many companies were doing it at that time but Gateway saw it as a key part of their M&A playbook, to transition new teams. We not only had integrated payroll but also HR, and by the time I left we had 450 people in our SSC.” In 2007, Steve swapped computers for biotech, and was invited by a former boss to join Invitrogen in San Diego. It reinforced the value of contacts and networking: “I made one call to my former boss and she said ‘I thought you’d never leave’,” he continues. “A week later I was on a flight and offered a job on site.” Ultimately having the grand title of ‘Controller for the Americas’, Steve set up an SSC in North America and South America, “My main interest was sport, especially baseball and basketball, and while I dreamed of playing for a living, and knew it was unlikely, I still always thought I’d end up working in the sports industry, perhaps as an agent or working within one of the league franchises.” Advancing the credit profession / www.cicm.com / May 2020 / PAGE 24
INTERVIEW AUTHOR – Sean Feast FCICM and then replicated the model in Europe, by which time Invitrogen had merged to become Life Technologies, a $4.5 billion business. Life Technologies was in turn acquired by Thermo Fisher to become a $25 billion+ business. COMMERCIAL RECOVERIES It was at Invitrogen that he first started using Paladin to support a need for commercial recoveries: “They were able to recover money from anywhere in the world,” Steve explains, “and were able to flex their staffing levels and flex their coverage to accommodate our needs across multiple time zones. What I liked about working with them was that we moved from being a client/supplier relationship to becoming a true partnership where we relied on each other. “We had an open dialogue and could look at one another across the table, even if it was bad news. We’d tell each other what we needed. In “For a young man happy to pack a bag and go anywhere they sent you, it was a great experience, Phoenix, Arizona was my favourite: “It’s where I met my wife.” negotiations, everyone thinks there has to be a winner, but if there’s a winner then there has to be a loser. We looked at it differently. We found common ground so that we both won.” Paladin had been founded by George Miles in 1997 as a pure commercial collections business. Steve’s relationship with George was such that they determined at some point to work together: “My parents had both been entrepreneurs: my father was a barber and my mother owned her own insurance agency, and so it was perhaps inevitable that I would one day want to ‘scratch an entrepreneurial itch’,” he says. The opportunity came when Thermo Fisher and Steve made the difficult decision to part ways “I’d also been working at the hard-end of the corporate world for nearly 30 years and wanted to do something different.” Steve was excited in joining Paladin, and the potential to expand its capabilities: “It was always exclusively a debt collection business Advancing the credit profession / www.cicm.com / May 2020 / PAGE 25 continues on page 26 >
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