BROADCASTS.com

When CFO Tania Secor looks back at the early years of her finance career, she can\u2019t help but revisit her decision to accept a position with the McGraw-Hill Companies.

For a half-dozen years, Secor had been entrenched in the private equity world, advising portfolio companies on different growth strategies and helping to complete the acquisition of a string of middle-market firms. Her new role at McGraw-Hill would not only leverage her M&A experience but also situate her within the corporate finance rank-and-file, where she grew accustomed to the cadence of tasks performed by the finance function.

\u201cI had never done a forecast myself, and I had never been through a rigorous budgeting and planning process at a $10 billion company,\u201d explains Secor, who over the next 8 years would advance into a number of different FP&A roles before being named CFO of the magazine Businessweek, a role that would lead her to become part of a future transaction.

\u201cI came back from maternity leave and was asked to work with the leadership team to sell Businessweek,\u201d recalls Secor, who would remain CFO of the media property after it was acquired by Bloomberg LLP.

\u201cDuring the transition, we had to rip our GL out of McGraw-Hill and put it into Bloomberg\u2014and this had to have been one of the most challenging times of my career,\u201d comments Secor, who notes that as the deal neared completion, her finance team lost its controller, which injected even more stress into the transition period. \xa0

Looking back, Secor says that she wouldn\u2019t want to relive the experience. At the same time, though, she leaves little doubt that ultimately it was the Businessweek transaction that allowed her to plant both feet on the CFO path. \u2013Jack Sweeney\xa0

CFOTL:\xa0Tell us about R/GA \u2026 what type of company is this, what does it do, and what are its offerings today?

Secor: R/GA is a digital innovation agency. We design businesses and brands for a more human future. This means that we engage strategists, technologists, creative people, and producers to develop campaigns, websites, mobile applications\u2014any type of digital experience\u2014for our clients, which include world-leading companies like Google, Samsung, Verizon, Nike, and 200 other firms for which we create these digital innovation experiences. We have 14 offices across the world and about 2,000 employees. We are a division of The Interpublic Group of Companies.

Interpublic Group has a large portfolio of different types of agencies and PR firms. The niche into which we fall is not necessarily media buying and planning\u2014which is \u201cmedia brands\u201d\u2014and it doesn\u2019t necessarily have anything to do with big standard campaigns for some of what you might consider to be traditional clients. Where we come in is in working with brands that are more innovative or want to complement their campaigns with some more innovative solutions. You might see an R/GA-developed TikTok campaign where the influencer on TikTok is actually engaging with you. We may have used volume capture to take an influencer and create a beautiful digital art campaign that turns into a commercial or a website design or a mobile app. Our services and capabilities run the gamut of the more innovative creative types of digital experiences.