Top-Paying CFO Jobs Not In Southland, Survey Concludes
By Jennifer Parsons© Pasadena Star-News. Sunday, May 20, 2001.
Chief financial officers seeking salaries in the upper six-figure category may need to start looking outside of Southern California's metropolitan areas, including Los Angeles, based on a recent industry survey.
The highest-paid CFOs are in or near Chicago, Cincinnati, Birmingham, Ala., Kansas City, Mo., Indianapolis, New York, Denver and Memphis, Tenn., according to Illinois-based Abbott, Langer & Associates Inc.
Executive recruiters, who have found it increasingly difficult to fill CFO positions at many of the larger local companies, are not surprised by the statistics.
CFOs are among the harder searches to work on in recent times, said Gary Kaplan, president and chief executive officer of Gary Kaplan & Associates, a Pasadena-based retained executive search firm. In particular, when companies are corporate headquarters that are requiring Wall Street experience or companies that are pre-IPO and are looking for someone who's had prior public offering experience.
Kaplan said CFOs have been in demand for the past few years, ever since the proliferation of new technology start-ups when many financial heads left old economy companies to work for the high-tech firms.
Some reported CFOs earn more than $600,000 in total annual compensation, although the median annual income of CFOs is $109,319, the report states.
The highest paid CFOs are going to be at corporate headquarters and Southern California does not have a lot of those because many left the area through acquisition and mergers, said Kaplan.
The survey information comes from Compensation in the Accounting/Financial Field, 19th Edition, a statistical analysis of salaries and cash compensation found in 324 organizations in the business, industry, government and nonprofit fields.
But many local CFOs from some of the larger prominent companies don't agree with the report's findings.
Bruce Burlington, CFO of Multacom in Industry, said a more accurate median compensation of CFOs at major companies is about $200,000.
There are some very high-paying CFO jobs here, he said. When people come to a major city, including Los Angeles, packages tend to increase in size.
They were in search of a CFO that could help them move to the next level, said Burlington, who has served as a CFO for the past 12 years. I get a lot of calls for jobs like this&I got two calls this week from headhunters.
Curt Bower, CFO of Parsons Corp. in Pasadena, said there is a nationwide shortage of qualified CFOs.
I constantly get calls from recruiters who are looking for people in Southern California and elsewhere and are not seeming to have great success in finding qualified people, said Bower.
