Donald Harford II, CPA

• Lead financial planning, cash management, and all analytical processes of RectorSeal which included ownership of all financial reporting deliverables, business analytics, forecasts, modeling, annual budgets, and planning objectives.
• Managed high-performing finance team of twelve, including three managers, providing guidance and mentorship to foster professional growth and development, while transforming the finance organization into the lead planning/forward looking resource.
• Collaborated with executive leadership in developing long-term financial goals, ensuring alignment with overall business objectives.
• Streamlined financial reporting processes by building out and implementing new financial models, software structuring including Highradius implementation, and optimizing data management.

Notable Contributions:

• Built foundational enterprise-wide planning models, allowing for a comprehensive view of working capital, profit/loss, and cash flows.
• Lead finance team value added activities into additional company groups, by plugging in our team’s skillset of financial analysis and modeling in order to build input driven planning models for various groups including but not limited to: container ship coordination, LTL trucking/shipment cost optimization, manufactured good vs purchased good planning, and most importantly on hand inventory planning.
• Lowered DSO (Days sales outstanding) 10%, by overseeing a collections tool software implementation, changing our AR team’s structure to utilize our international counterparts, as well as improving customers payment terms/implementing new policies to encourage timely payments (the change in policy/customer terms did not result in any loss of business nor cause any friction with our sale’s team relationship with our customer).
• Improved our 13 week cash flow model from 70% accuracy to 95% weekly accuracy which has saved $450K of interest expense from our revolver..
• Organized/lead first bottoms up annual budget, which was a large undertaking for our team, but the benefits of inner-company collaboration and data/insight collected by department/site/entity were immediately accretive by investing small amounts of needed capital to greatly lower operational costs.
• Decreased month end management reporting to executive group from WD15 to WD7
• Fronted financial integration of two acquired companies without impacting on-going operational performance
• Improved new product to market approval cycle by completely revamping processes to incorporate our strategic objectives by outline clear and tangible metrics that must be met in order to move forward with a new product - this knowledge empowered our new product team and increased approval to 70% from 30%, additionally ~75% new products approved under my tenure have meet our internal IRR, previously was ~50%.

• As right hand to the CFO, partnered with Senior Leadership and Board Members in developing/revamping structures of the finance team and long-term strategic initiatives for a rapidly growing company.
• Responsible for convincing executive management to wisely spend and or raise capital by creating lines of communication and distributing all management reporting in a timely manner, as well as all information that will be disseminated by internal and external stakeholders such as but not limited to; Banks, Investment Banks, Data room inquiries, US Analyst, London Analyst, general investor relations inquiries and most importantly the BOD.
• Managed and mentored six accountants and two financial analysts, fostering professional growth and enhancing productivity within the team allowing for goals to be reached.

Notable Contributions:

• Created and presented capital intensive projects to joint venture owners during an oil downturn to take advantage of lower costs and be positioned to have higher production when oil prices undoubtedly return - This resulted in raising over $250M in capital to be spent drilling wells and increasing production.
• Developed Vaalco’s M&A team and oversaw all related initiatives and deadlines, successfully completed due diligence, and presented multiple vetted merger/acquisition candidates to the Strategic committee.
• Spearheaded integration of finance with a merger of equals within 90 days.
• Successfully convinced BOD to approve moving forward on several acquisitions through competently and confidently displaying shareholder accretion of the deal proposed.
• Oversight and creation of all public guidance figures to be given to the market with over 98% accuracy, meaning actual results fell outside of guidance ranges given 2% of the time in last 12 quarters.
• Enhanced efficiencies on forecasting and budgeting through thoughtful process improvement and by building strong relationships with operations to get their full buy in - Time needed to roll all forecasts after close was down to two days, from eight.
• Reduced total hours spent on the JV, corporate and consolidated yearly budget to 500 hours from 1800 hours.

• Responsible for developing/creating financial models with varying degrees of inputs and outputs in order to provide appropriate levels of analysis depending on target end-users.
• Enabled informed decision-making with timely delivery of reporting tailored to specific stakeholder needs.

Notable Contributions:

• Created and presented JV operational budgets to BODs and joint owners which got approved on time for the first time in known company history.
• Created intuitive financial models that allowed management to remove three full time contractor positions resulting in savings of ~500K annually.
• Created companywide economic models that provided highly detailed valuations of the enterprise, which created confidence in our BOD and executive team to make strategic long term decisions on whether to move forward on deploying capital organically, inorganically, as well as proper valuations to sell the entire portfolio.

• Established creation, review, and preparation of all public filing with the SEC.
• Primarily hired out of request from the BOD to aid in the remediation of a material weakness that was resolved.
• Improved financial reporting accuracy by streamlining data collection and analysis processes.

• Collaborated amongst teams to provide excellent client service by understanding client businesses and delivering timely financial statement audit reports
• Performed testing of client provided work papers to assess reasonableness of financial statement numbers and disclosures using U.S. GAAP and GAAS standards.

Notable Contributions:

• In-Charged RSM Houston’s first audit of a publicly traded entity.
• In-Charged RSM Houston’s first engagement of a Fortune 100 entity.
• Assisted with procurement of top talent from tier 1 universities that eventually led to full time employees.

• Prepared and advised complex tax structured companies ranging from franchise returns to publicly traded companies with revenue up to $500,000,000.
• Prepared US GAAP compliant Balance Sheets and Income Statements for Clients as well as cash and accrual adjustments from revenue to depreciation schedules to comply with all reporting needs of our client.

Notable Contributions:

• Demonstrated a high level of work efficiency & professionalism by producing 70 hours of high-quality work weekly while successfully taking/passing all sections of the CPA exam.

• Integrated Tetra’s newly acquired subsidiaries’ software and ERP systems to properly and timely communicate their financials and other key data points to corporate.

Notable Contributions:

• Assisted with execution of companywide integrations of BPC.
• Handled divesture of lagging subsidiaries’ through companywide integration of BPC, universal reporting standard.