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Women’s Business Group Selects Oman for Top Award
NAWBO cites her skill in boosting revenue for Certes
By: Jim Buchta, Star Triune Staff Writer
Karen Oman has a big scrapbook full of travel pictures: white sandy beaches, postcards from exotic places and had-written notes from people thanking her for their lives.
It’s not exactly what you’d expect to find on the desk of someone who runs a multimillion-dollar financial services company, but then again, most executives don’t have a desk overlooking a trampoline and bright blue swimming pool.
Oman – President and founder of Certes Financial Pros, a high-end financial consulting company that provides certified public accountants and other numbers folks to companies on a short-term basis – spends most of her work-week at he home office in Golden Valley.
She extends the same flexibility to many of her employees, and that’s on of the reasons she was named Woman Business Owner of the Year by the Minnesota chapter of the National Association of Women Business Owners (NAWBO).
The scrapbook was a gift from some of the employees who have benefited from Oman’s flexible schedule program, which lets employees take up to half the year off to tend personal matters while still retaining benefits. She received the book in 2000 when the company won the “Best Employer” award from Working Woman magazine.
In addition to cultivating a “balanced workplace environment,” Oman was selected for the NAWBO prize fro over coming adversity, said Pam Krank, NAWBO’s co-president and owner of a company called the Credit Department.
Company now has stable of more than 100 people
Oman’s triumph in that regard was her ability to substantially increase revenue while other personnel supply companies are wrestling with the softened demand for employees that typically attends a recession.
“[Personnel supply companies] go into a recession much faster than the economy,” Krank said. “It really stood out for the group making the decision that Karen could take her business and grow it despite the fact that her industry is suffering overall.”
Since founding the St. Louis Park company in 1994, revenue has grown from $100,000 to more than $7.4 million last year – a 28 percent increase over 2000.
Comparable growth at on one of her local competitors, Robert Half International’s Management Resources Division, was only 23.4 percent nationally during the same period.
Part of her success comes down to a pretty simple idea, Oman said, which is written on a golden ruler she passes out like a calling card. It says, “Treat others as you would want to be treated…Works in business, too.”
Krank said it’s an approach that makes the community a better place to live and work.
Frustrated CPAs
Oman started thinking about how to make the world a better place to work more than a decade ago when she left the corporate world.
Her last corporate job – as a senior financial analyst for Cowles Media Corp. (now part of a McClatchy Co., which owns the Star Tribune) – required too much travel, too much time away from her family and too little control over her life.
A diabetes diagnosis and two young daughters made reprioritizing even more important.
She started by acting as a consultant working for companies on a project-by-project basis.
She was inspired by a trend toward outsourcing that she first noticed in the information technology world, and she saw an opportunity to provide a similar service to companies in the process of expanding or downsizing. Many companies just don’t have the resources or long-term needs for highly skilled financial experts.
She started recruiting CPAs and financial executives with a newspaper ad. It went something like this:
“CPAs: Get a life. Work for the best companies in town. Pay: $30 and up.”
A lot of people responded, including some of the best in the business, she said. Today, the company has a stable of more than 100 people, including such rarefied execs as a former controller of GE Capital. About 85 percent are CPAs; the average assignment lasts four months to a year, and Oman lets them choose which companies they want to work for.
They come to her – and stay – because they’re all seeking the same thing: good pay and flexibility. Turnover is low; the average tenure is three years, but some have been with the company since Oman founded it in 1994. Her husband, Jim is treasurer.
Oman, who takes Fridays off as “creative day,” said that with the economy still laboring along and competition for fewer customers stronger than ever, happy employees are the key to snagging companies that have gone from being “fat and happy to lean and mean.”
“Any company in change needs us,” she said. “Our company makes them lean and happy.”
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