BROADCASTS.com

Steve Mitchell had not been working for Irish telecom giant Eircom for even half a year before he decided that it was time to explore other opportunities.

For the previous 4 months, the seasoned operations executive had been commuting weekly to Dublin, Ireland, from his home in the United Kingdom as he sought to nurture Eircom\u2019s waning mobile customer relationships.  

However, Eircom\u2019s CFO upended Mitchell\u2019s plans by offering him the position of corporate finance director.

\u201cI went over there for a few months and ended up staying for 4-1/2 years,\u201d recalls Mitchell, who still seems surprised by the CFO\u2019s job offer. \u201cI hadn\u2019t even worked in finance during the previous 8 years.\u201d

Over the next 18 months, Mitchell\u2019s responsibilities would expand to include investor relations, treasury, M&A, and running Eircom\u2019s cap ex committee.

Besides regularly delivering investor presentations, at one point Mitchell found himself before the European Commission, defending Eircom\u2019s competitive position relative to recent telecom market consolidation.

\u201cSince those first couple of years with Eircom, nothing has really phased me,\u201d remarks Mitchell, whose appointment came as Eircom was making the business case with its board and investors to lock in a first-mover advantage when it came to rolling out a 4G network across Ireland.  

Given the breadth of Mitchell\u2019s functional responsibilities, it soon became clear that he was also expected to rally the internal finance team to bring forth the financial insights required to move the business case forward.      

\u201cThe finance people working on the fiber rollout business case could have either sat and fiddled with spreadsheets for months or else put the bit between their teeth and realized that they were about to drive the biggest decision that the business was going to make all year,\u201d comments Mitchell, who adds that while his years at Eircom revealed to him the complexity of leadership decision-making, they also exposed how finance looms large.

Says Mitchell: \u201cA couple of really good pieces of analysis from the finance team ended up driving management and board decisions with regard to where that cap ex would go and whether we were ready to make the move.\u201d \u2013Jack Sweeney