Video ID: 660
Interviewee: Kimberlee MacMullan
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My name is Kimberlee MacMullan, and I am currently the director of finance at
DirectTV in Los Angeles, California. So on a day to day basis, we have a lot f
fun, I would like to think that I create that environment, but because we are in a
finance and accounting department, it can be stressful. I get to the office early –
usually 6-6:30, get a few personal things done, get into a work mode where I
am going to be able to focus. On a specific level, I would say there are a
number of days I would say there are a number of days where we are involved
with the accounting cycle, which is not very glamorous but very important,
again, making that fun can be very difficult. Also, going over a lot of the
technical accounting, and making sure we deliver on time to financial reporting.
Most of the rest of the month is serving the needs of our executive management
through ad-hop reporting, variance analysis, and a lot of analytics. If a senior
executive calls down to us and asks us for the impact for a certain customer
behavior, like an example of that would be if we have an offer of some sort.
And we want to understand the market impact of that, and ultimately the
financial impact of that particular offer. We do a lot of analytics, so what I
would have to do then is pull my resources, explain the project to them and
have them work on that. My job is to make sure they have the resources to do
that. And then just keeping up with email, and phone calls, a lot of meetings,
because when u get past a middle management, or in to middle management
level, you do have a lot of meetings because you are not only managing only the
people getting the job done, but you are managing the information, delivery,
and socialization of those projects upward.
The culture and the leadership create the environment. I have found that a lot of
corporations, that culture and leadership, the personality of that company is
definitely influenced by the people running it. Right now we have a great CEO
that I report to – a great boss – and our interim executive leadership team are
very competent and also very humanitarian in how they approach the people
that work for them. So I would say, in a sentence, I enjoy the company that I
work for regardless of whether I have a good day or a bad day in terms of my
actual tasks; just being there and being a part of that environment is a lot of fun.
I’ve also been in entertainment for a long time. In terms of an industry that I
enjoy, that motivates me to go to work, I have a career mostly in entertainment.
I’ve worked at four studios, and now I’ve been at DirectTV for seven years, so
the management of the entertainment business is very interesting to me. It’s all
the gears, mechanisms, behind what is ultimately delivered to your television
and/or your film screen, so I have a great interest in that. Like I said, I enjoy the
people I work with, in addition to the people I work for.
It’s not uncommon, but it’s not that common to work for particularly a
marketing major to end up in finance and accounting or vice versa, because,
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unfortunately, the skills are seen as one being very quantitative and one being
qualitative. I have found that there is remarkable value in learning the
languages that sales and marketing are speaking, and the languages being
spoken in finance – those guys in accounting that they are referred to. Without
the two, there is no company, and for a student in either one of those
disciplines, my recommendation would be to have a basic understanding of
what’s happening in other functions of a company. I’m going to take that even
outside of accounting, sales, and marketing, and say there’s an IT group, there’s
management information systems, there are facilities managers, there is
executive leadership, there are in-house legal groups – and your course work in
textbook to understand what’s happening in each of those is great, but once you
start working, seek out information of how all these functions actually make the
company work together.
What I did – I was at Penn State as a marketing major – which actually, if I am
working in my major, it’s because I am very much interested in and intrigued in
the brand concept. So as a marketing major in school, of course I wanted to
work for one of the big consumer products companies, and I ended up in retail,
which serves its purpose at that particular time. From there I went back to
graduate school and I got my MBA at Lehigh University, and I was a small
business consultant while I was there. I very much enjoyed problem solving
and assisting someone else make a strategic decision, particularly for business.
So my dream then was to become a business consultant, and my next job out of
there was at Deloite Duesch. That was funny because I had hoped to be at a
consultant group and I ended up in the audit group. The next thing you know
I’m studying for this thing called the CPA exam, and I’m going, ‘this is
ridiculous, I’m never going to pass this’ – and I did, and it was a credential that
I never thought I would have. What that did is open some significant
advancement for me quickly. I started to explore the entertainment business,
and after a few years in corporate audit at Sony, I moved to California and
ended up working at 4 studios, and a consulting firm – finally – where I was for
5 years doing financial and project consulting at DirectTV, who said we’d like
to pay you to work full time for us. I made the transition from consultant to a
full time employee at DirectTV.
I would say one, take your credentials seriously; even if you say I don’t want to
be a CPA, I’m not sure about graduate school, take your degree seriously. Be
proud of it, be proud of what you’ve done extracurricularly – speak to it, create
it, there is a lot of talk about branding. We’ve evolved into a society where
we’ve now taken that to a personal level – what is your personal brand, how are
you represented, what are you thinking of me right now, what do people thing
when they look at my Facebook page? I’m very active in my community and I
have a Facebook page, but my Facebook page represents me, it represents what
I want people to believe in me as a community leader and as a professional –
that speaks to your brand. How do you feel about your degree, how do you feel
about what you’ve learned, if you’ve been a leader in extracurricular activities.
As an employer and someone that would hire you, that’s a skill we hope we
don’t have to teach you. If you are developing that on your own, even if you
are at an entry level position or a staff position, that speaks volumes to your
desire to be promoted.
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