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Community IT Innovators Voices: Vince Grady, CFO

• Community IT Innovators • Season 5 • Episode 24

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In today’s interview, Carolyn talks with Vince Grady, the new Community IT Chief Financial Officer (CFO) who is 8 months into the job. Vince and Carolyn discuss his roundabout path to the CFO role, and how a diversity of backgrounds is common at Community IT and valued as one of our strengths – not all our employees have followed a typical path and that helps us connect with our nonprofit clients who often also have non-conventional backgrounds, education, and careers.

Vince also comments on the value of mentors in his career, and he and Carolyn discuss steps to finding mentors you connect with and can turn to for advice. The takeaway? Be open to finding mentors that have the skills you want to develop, in addition to the career roles you want to grow into, and invite mentorship wherever you find it. Most people love being invited out for coffee and to discuss their skills and experience.

Vince and Carolyn also discuss the way being an employee-owned company (ESOP) has shaped the internal culture at Community IT in valuable ways.

“It is cool seeing how being an ESOP affects the culture of our company. I can see first hand that it has such a positive impact on our employees. Everyone feels so connected and has pride of ownership in their work and in our mission, because they have a say in it, ultimately.”  Vince Grady


Join us for our series featuring interviews with Community IT employees. In this series, we talk about nonprofit technology career paths, career resources, skills, and certifications. We will also touch on mentoring opportunities as you start out on your career and ways to give back if you are further along. If you are wondering what it is like to work at a place like Community IT, you can learn about it here. https://communityit.com/careers/

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Carolyn Woodard: Welcome, everyone, to the Community IT Innovators’ Voices series. My name is Carolyn Woodard, and I am the Outreach Director at Community IT. And today, I am really excited to talk to Vince Grady, who is our new Chief Financial Officer, CFO.

Vince, would you like to introduce yourself a little bit and tell us, what does a CFO do?

Vince Grady: Well, it’s great to be here. Thank you. As you said, I’m pretty new.

I’m on, I think, month eight of being here, which seems like it was just yesterday. I suppose that’s a good thing. 

What I do for the company is I’m in charge of all the financial reporting and analysis, kind of mapping out our future as far as budgeting and making sure we have a healthy path forward.

I’m also in charge of a lot of the legal and regulatory compliance to make sure we are always following the rules that we need to. And also, I’m kind of the ESOP, the Employee Stock Option Plan, the Administrator for that. So, kind of a mixed bag of things, the day is always interesting, plenty to do

Carolyn Woodard: 


What do you do on a typical day? 

Is it all meetings? Is it all regulatory, making sure things are correct, checking the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed?

Vince Grady: Yeah, so I kind of have my usual checklist I go through and go into our accounting software and just poke around and make sure things look good, seeing what deposits we’ve gotten from clients and flagging accounts receivable to see if anything is overdue. It’s like the road test that I do. 

My days now have been interesting because there’s so many initiatives. When I was hired, everyone’s like, oh, I want to do this, I want to do this. I have my list of initiatives that I go through. 

Right now, I’m dabbling in many different things at once. I’m looking at our policies and procedures as a company every day and making notes and setting up department budgets so that when our leadership looks at our annual budget, we have something there that we can react to.

They’re big-ticket items, but I’m kind of working on them every single day.

We had a CFO for a decade, I believe, so I’m sure there’s always an opportunity when a new person comes in to look at all of the processes and just question, why are we doing it this way? Is there an easier way to do it? Are you finding some of that?

And just a shout out to Bill, our former CFO. He was amazing. He left this place in really good hands. There are no fires that I had to put out. Everything is going great, and everything was set up for success. There’s not a whole lot of tinkering there.

I could probably do as much as I want to. But Johan, our CEO, when he hired me, he really wanted me to look at all of our systems and processes with fresh eyes. I’m hoping I can expand on that. Not everything needs to be fixed or tweaked, but focusing on the parts that we could be doing a little more efficiently or if there’s a different system that we should probably use that’s going to give us more results.

So that’s kind of where I’m at right now.

Carolyn Woodard: 


You mentioned earlier the Employee Stock Option Plan and want to shout out that Community IT is 100% employee owned. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

I think it adds an extra layer of management onto our finances.

Vince Grady: Yeah, it definitely works a little bit differently. Walking in, I didn’t have a lot of ESOP experience. I knew what an ESOP was.

In one of my former roles, we were kind of toying with the idea of going 100% ESOP. I kind of knew how to get things started. But actually, managing it is a whole different thing for me.

And thankfully, again, our former CFO was kind of like a wizard when it came to ESOP. And he has been mentoring me and giving me a lot of great information. The great thing about the ESOP world is it’s fairly small, and there’s lots of conferences and webinars. I’ve picked up so much information that way. 

But speaking to the actual ESOP, it does have an administration piece to it. Of course, there’s regulations and laws that we have to follow. But we have a great team. We have an outside trustee, Paul Horn, who’s been fantastic. He’s like the overseer of our ESOP plan. He has so much knowledge and has been a great resource for all of us, actually, not just me.

Carolyn Woodard: We have other resources on our site, too, about ESOP and the way that employee ownership works. It’s just fascinating to me. And I really love at Community IT the way it works, or the way we understand what some of the benefits are of the employees having a lot of knowledge and transparency about the way the business is working and how we’re each a part of that.

And it really helps employees stay for a longer time because we get very invested in the company being successful and doing the mission that we’re interested in – serving nonprofits. 

It’s interesting to hear that you weren’t an ESOP expert when you came in, but I guarantee you’ll be an ESOP expert by the time you’re finished with your service with us, because it is very complex, but just has so many benefits.

Vince Grady: To your point, just talking about it in a cultural way, it really is cool how seeing how being an ESOP affects the culture of our company. And I can see firsthand that it has such a positive impact on our employees, and everyone feels so connected and has pride and ownership in their work and our mission, because they have a say in it, ultimately.

Carolyn Woodard: Yes, I have been at other companies where there were mandatory all-staff meetings about this policy or that policy, and everyone just didn’t want to have to go, tuned it out, just did the minimum. But I’ve been just amazed, as an employee of Community IT, to everyone, those meetings are actually really interesting, and everyone pays attention and has questions about the different policies and the work of the company.

Yeah, that’s what an ESOP does, and it’s great to experience it. 

I wanted to ask you about your qualifications to be a Chief Financial Officer.


What kind of training and background did you have when you applied for the Community IT job?

Vince Grady: I can start off by saying that I don’t necessarily have the pedigree qualifications of a CFO. I majored in political science, and I don’t have an MBA. But anyway, I’ve had lots of on-the-job training, which, you know, qualifies.

But in my previous roles, I’ve kind of married finance and operations together. I think it’s a really great quality to have an executive or a CFO position, because you’re not just thinking about numbers. And since I’m not just a finance nerd, I’m able to talk to other people in a broader way, in maybe a more understandable way about numbers, instead of being just an accountant.

I think that was an attractive quality in the CFO role. And I’ve always been able to wear many hats and pitch in where needed. I really like doing that, because it exposes you to so many different things and I just always want to be helpful where I can.

Carolyn Woodard: I like that that actually coincides with a lot of people at Community IT, the tech staff as well. Some of them were teachers before or had other roles. And so having a more broadly developed background at a place like Community IT is definitely a benefit.


When you found out about the job opening at Community IT, how did that work? How did Community IT strike you? And what do you think it was about Community IT that made you excited to apply?

Vince Grady: I found a job through a recruiter that CIT had engaged for the search. Just looking at the mission and the clients that CIT serves, it just felt like such a great fit for me. 

In one of my previous positions, our company was like a behavior change marketing agency, and a lot of our clients were nonprofits. It was such a rewarding experience, serving clients that had such a great impact, and it made everyone else feel really good. I wanted to get back to that kind of sentiment of helping others do something really good.

Carolyn Woodard: 


Do you have advice for other finance nerds? 

People who either have that pedigree, they did a Finance MBA as their formal studies, or have some alternative experience like you did, about getting into finance in nonprofits? Or with a company like Community IT that serves nonprofits? Is there something you can do to make your resume stronger?

Vince Grady: 

I don’t think it’s all about, oh, I need this qualification or this certification or I need to take these courses in order to get into it. I think just getting exposed to so many different things, being open minded about what you want to do is important. 


Obviously, when I graduated college, I myself wasn’t like, oh, I’m going to be a CFO one day. I was going to be a lawyer, which thankfully didn’t happen. I just think being open minded and not taking it too seriously. Especially working in the nonprofit sector, it’s not a cutthroat environment where you’re all trying to get to the next thing or trying to rise up. It’s more of a collective, collaborative space. And I think the people and the qualifications that you have should reflect that as well.

Carolyn Woodard: 


So maybe working on some of those people skills and soft skills is important.

Vince Grady: Yeah, I think you hit it on the head. I think soft skills and people skills are definitely going hand in hand working in the nonprofit space.

Carolyn Woodard: Sounds like you also had mentors, like you have a mentor now or a couple mentors in the ESOP space and our former CFO. 


Do you have any advice on how to look for those people who can help you figure out what you want to do, figure out what qualifications you need to attain or where to look, maybe if you’re making a career change? Do you have advice about that?

Vince Grady: It doesn’t have to be your superior. It could be anybody who can qualify as a mentor, just whoever really makes you feel safe and heard.I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few bosses that fit that mold and that worked for me.

If you’re somebody who needs more attention and more guidance, then I think you should definitely search for a mentor who’s going to fit that. 

If you want somebody who’s going to be a little more hands-off, but kind of in the background, which has been what I’ve been seeking for, I think that that’s definitely somebody that you should reach out to and get to know and see if they want to guide you.

Carolyn Woodard: Sounds like more developing those people skills and soft skills figuring out your leadership style and communication style and finding someone who has a compatible style who’s interested in mentoring you. 

I think that’s good advice. A lot of times, advice on finding mentors is go to meetups or go interview people at your company where you’re working.

Especially if you want to change your field or change your job, that can be a barrier to finding a mentor who’s going to help you with that. I think just keep your options open. When you meet someone that you connect with, even if they’re not in your field at all, if they have some of those skills that you want to learn, you can have coffee with them.

Vince Grady: Definitely. Yeah, I think knowing yourself and knowing what you need is super important and finding that, yeah.

Carolyn Woodard: So that actually is a good segue into asking you about Community IT, because I feel like our internal culture really encourages both. 

We hire people like that who know who they are and what they want to do and are interested in learning more skills, different skills, doing what needs to be done. 


When you think about how you talk about Community IT to other people as a relatively new employee, what is your elevator pitch or your cocktail party explanation of what you do? What does Community IT do?

Vince Grady: I could start out with; we are a managed services provider that services nonprofit clients. That is what we do, but I’ve been finding myself talking more and more about the culture and the people. Even though we’re a company that’s pretty much 100% remote, so we’re not all in the same space all the time, it still feels like such a community.

And I think our leadership has really tried to make the culture like a community.

We do things like different meetings and sessions throughout the months and years. I think those things are really helpful and important to maintain such a close-knit group of people, especially since we’re spread all around the country.

For example, we just did our charity golf round for our client, Rosemount Center. Four people got together, three of us not very good golfers at all, and one person who was fairly good, but there was no one-upmanship. If somebody made a really good putt or a really good drive, or their ball went into the woods and you never saw it again, we all just congratulated each other and high-fived. And it was just such a wonderful experience. And I think that really encapsulates what Community IT is.

It’s just awesome and it’s refreshing.

Carolyn Woodard: I was going to ask you about golf, and you beat me to it. I have seen the photos and the video, and it looks like you guys had a blast. And the weather was perfect, and it was so wonderful to help one of our clients, Rosemount Center, with their fundraiser and have a good time doing it.

And I think you’re right, that really describes what Community IT internal culture is all about. Thank you very much for joining me, Vince. I really appreciate you taking the time to tell us about your job and Community IT.

Vince Grady: Yeah, I appreciate this. Thanks for listening.