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Back in 2015, Katie Rooney was only 7 months into her first industry CFO role at Aon when her boss asked her to exit the office.

\\u201cHe came into my office on November 1 and said, \\u2018I\\u2019m retiring, and I want you to take on my role. I\\u2019m leaving in 8 weeks,\\u2019\\u201d recalls Rooney, who says that the news triggered a mix of surprise and fear, which she recalls outwardly expressing with the words \\u201cOh, my God!\\u201d

Her boss quickly sought to ease her concerns.

\\u201cHe said: \\u2018You know what? It will be the best thing for you. If I stick around, you will never get the credit from the team,\\u201d explains Rooney, who subsequently swapped her CFO business unit responsibilities for her boss\\u2019s broader, divisional-level CFO portfolio.

Looking back, Rooney confides that she expected to someday to fill her boss\\u2019s shoes, but perhaps in 2017 or 2018\\u2014and certainly not in 2015. For her, though, the timing would turn out to be most fortuitous.

In early 2017, 13 months after she had officially taken on her boss\\u2019s role, Aon announced plans to sell its employee benefits outsourcing business to private equity firm Blackstone Group as part of a \\u201ccarve out\\u201d strategy that eventually rebranded the stand-alone business as Alight Solutions.

\\u201cWe called ourselves a $2.3 billion startup,\\u201d remembers Rooney, who says that she now realizes how her boss\\u2019s decision to step aside in late 2015 ensured her inclusion in the early round of discussions that ultimately led to a deal with Blackstone and her subsequent appointment as CFO of Alight Solutions.

\\u201cWe kind of had this moment when we said, \\u2018The capital structure and some of the margin components just don\\u2019t fit with the larger business,\\u2019 so we started thinking about carving the business out,\\u201d responds Rooney, when asked to recall the moment of insight that may have helped to hatch Alight Solutions. \\u2013Jack Sweeney

Rooney:\\xa0 As I think about the next 12 months, we have to execute on the strategy we've now brought together. We are at this incredible place in time where our business is uniquely positioned to help solve the needs of our clients and their employees. We can help drive down the total cost of the workforce. We can try to drive and improve health outcomes. And as we think about the financial stresses created by the pandemic, thinking about overall financial wellbeing, there's so much opportunity here, and we've pulled the strategy together, and as I mentioned, I think we've built the right KPIs around it.

We're now working on building out a detailed operating plan that will hold us accountable day over day around executing against this, because its about driving more value. We're taking an outcome based approach. We're leading with technology and really looking at everything, but we now have to hold ourselves accountable day over day to execute against that. And I think finance plays an incredibly important role there as we think about how we develop the operating plan to get all of our leaders, all of our businesses, aligned around what's required to drive that forward. So that's really where we're focused here over the next couple of months.