CFO with no predecessor

OSCA had just come out of a year-long COVID furlough. A student cooperative turns over its entire membership every few years anyway; a year of closure erased roughly a third of what was left of the institutional memory. The people who knew how the finances actually worked were gone.

I was elected Chief Financial Officer into that gap — no predecessor, no overlap period, no handoff. The stakes weren't abstract org-chart stakes. The co-op is where 400 people live and eat. If the budget didn't work, housing and food didn't work.

First, I had to reconstruct the CFO role itself — what it did, what it owed the membership, what the annual cycle looked like — out of documents left on an old server, with no mentor to check my reasoning against.

Second, and at the same time, the entire financial model had to adapt to a rent increase imposed unilaterally by a landlord with total leverage. Oberlin College owned the buildings; OSCA had no alternative housing stock and no real ability to walk away.

Rebuild the function and rescue the budget, at the same time, with no one who'd done it before.

I invested ~200 hours writing training documentation before the crisis hit, instead of learning reactively. It was tempting to treat the rent negotiation as the only real work and figure out the rest as it came. I did the opposite: I spent the early months reconstructing and writing down the role — the calendar, the reconciliation process, the decision rights — so that the version of me negotiating in month six had something to stand on, and so the next person wouldn't inherit the same blank page I did.

I built durable infrastructure rather than personally absorbing the crisis. The fastest path through the year would have been to centralize everything on myself. Instead I built a treasurer training program for house-level financial officers, redesigned the joint finance committee so that decision-making was shared and legible, and ran a finance retreat to bring officers up to a common baseline. Slower in the moment, and the only version that survives a member turning over.

I made calls I knew would be unpopular, and named them as trade-offs. Negotiating against Oberlin's lawyers made the asymmetry plain: they had institutional counsel and time, we had students and a semester. I had to accept terms I didn't like in order to reopen on schedule, then go back to membership and defend a budget that raised what people paid. Some members were angry — reasonably so. I chose to be specific with them about what we were buying with that increase rather than soften the number.

The training materials and the committee structure I built are still in use years later. That's the result I'd lead with: the organization's financial function is no longer dependent on whoever happens to hold the office.

Alongside that: the co-ops reopened on schedule, dining and payroll ran without interruption through the transition, and the budget was restructured to survive the new lease terms rather than merely absorb them for one year.

The thing that made the year survivable wasn't my own effort — it was every structure that let other people be effective without me in the room. That's the principle I've carried into people and culture work: the job isn't to absorb the difficulty, it's to build environments where capable people can actually thrive, especially when the conditions are bad.