Leisa: Hello, I'm Leisa Holland-Nelson, and this is The Businessmakers Show, heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessmakers.com. I'm here today with Barbara Duganier, senior executive and head of North American finance business services fro Accenture. Barbara, welcome to The Businessmakers.

Barbara: Thank you, Leisa.

Leisa: I know you have a great big job, and our listeners would love to hear all the details about it. Please tell us what you do.

Barbara: Well, in a nutshell, what I do is I help companies achieve high performance through their finance organization. Finance organization is very critical to an organization in terms of achieving its strategy, its growth, being able to report earnings, and obviously, all the things that a finance organization needs to do in terms of their metrics and their transparency. So Accenture helps companies with people, process, and technology around various functions, including the finance function, which I'm involved in.

Leisa: I know you've had some extraordinary positions on the way to the one that you're in now. Tell us a little about your career path.

Barbara: Well, I've had a 33-year career. I spent the first 23 years at Arthur Anderson. I was about a decade in audit, and I worked with a lot of energy companies as well as some airlines, and then I spent a decade in consulting, largely in finance consulting. So this is really coming back to kind of where I started. And then as the global chief financial officer for Anderson Worldwide where I have several thousand finance people and ran all the finance function within Anderson on a worldwide basis.

Leisa: So you were the CFO of Anderson. But first, you were an auditor, like a CPA auditor, and then you became a consultant. Tell me a little about that transition. Was it difficult?

Barbara: Well, it was actually quite fun. And I'm actually still a CPA, by the way. Once you get the license, you don't want to give it up.

Leisa: So you have to go back and keep trained, and take courses, continuing learning.

Barbara: Yeah, absolutely. There's a certain number of - absolutely, the continuing education. But the transition was actually fun because back in that time, I started with Anderson in '79. So in the late '80s, we were really growing our consulting business within Arthur Anderson, so one of the areas I was asked to grow is in financial consulting and litigation consulting. So litigation, corporate recovery, corporate finance, et cetera. So building a business was quite fun from scratch, as well as working with companies and some of their really critical problems that they had, whether it be bankruptcies or reorganizations, or obviously, litigation that comes along.

Leisa: Auditing, consulting, I think you took a year and went sort of outside of that game. What were you doing?

Barbara: I did. When Anderson wound down, I went as an independent consultant, really worked for myself, but my big client was Duke Energy North America, which was the trading organization within Duke located here in Houston, and I led the finance transformation program. So again, people processed technology. This was prior to the merger with Spectra Energy, so I really led that, reported to the CEO, and the steering committee that was really responsible for that. And then after that assignment, I was recruited by Accenture, which is former Anderson Consulting, to come in and really be in their finance part of the outsourcing business.

Leisa: Were you at all trepidatious about going back to Accenture, which really was your former company, or were you excited to rejoin your cohorts?

Barbara: I was excited. It really seemed like home. I mean Accenture is a great place. It's taken the best of a lot of things from heritage and really built on that, and even improved, obviously, on that. It's just a significant company today with over 250,000 people all over the world.

Leisa: The growth has really been extraordinary.

Barbara: It has. The growth has been extraordinary, and doing extraordinary things to help companies all over the globe.

Leisa: Well, you're practicing in a really interesting area, and I know that we've been talking about it a little bit, and I think probably we should talk further about the energy business today, and even a little bit about what you see for the future of the energy business, especially in the position that you're in.

Barbara: Sure, and it's exciting being here in Houston. I went to a session yesterday. Houston was talked about as the energy capital of the world. Of course, we loved that. Right? And it's very true. I mean we're in the center of significant growth and a move toward North American energy independence. And it really is going to take a lot of hard work to get there, but obviously, the plays are there, and the ability to be able to gain that independence and gain the reduction and the trade deficit and all those things that are in the projections are there. But in order to do that, companies really need help.

One of the areas that companies are really struggling is to get the appropriate talent, whether that be the leadership or the folks in the field, particularly in remote areas where some of these unconventional oil plays take place. And so it's very difficult to be able to get the right folks in place and then grow from there. The other areas are being able to get the proper processes in place to make sure that the unconventionals are developed appropriately with all the appropriate back office functions that support that as well as the technologies that support that growth. So those are areas that I'm working a lot in in companies right now that are experiencing significant growth, some of them doubling their portfolios or even more, and going into areas where they haven't been in over a decade. And dealing with shortages of personnel because of the retirements and the industry and the fact that the investments have not been made that really need to be made in those areas. So it's a lot of fun to experience that explosion of growth.

Leisa: Are you working on something just so interesting you feel like you have to share it with us?

Barbara: Well, all of what I just mentioned, and really for a lot of significant companies that, you know, because of client confidential, I can't really talk about it, but picture some of the biggest companies and some of the things that they really need to do, and we're helping middle sized companies as well as very large companies deal with those issues. But it's all exciting, again, particularly because we are where we are, and we're seeing it every day. We can walk down the street in Houston and see all these companies, or we can go to Canada and walk down and see all the energy companies there. So it's really a significant opportunity to experience something that hasn't occurred in over a decade at least.

Leisa: Okay, that wraps up my discussion with Barbara Duganier. This is The Businessmakers Show, heard on the radio and seen online at TheBusinessmakers.com.