Chris Jones

The person an owner trusts when the ground moves. I don't delegate from a distance. I'm hands-on, and I prefer to work alongside people rather than hand them a deliverable. What I've enjoyed most across my career is being in roles where I wear a lot of hats. At The Rhodes Group I owned finance, HR, IT and administration, which gave me a full picture of how a business actually worked and how every decision landed on the team. Most recently, as CFO of Overly Door Company, I was a partner to ownership rather than just a scorekeeper — including guiding the company through a sale.

Along the way I've described myself as knowing a little bit about a lot of things. In a small company that turns out to be the point: the finance problem is usually also a systems problem, or an HR problem, or a vendor problem, and someone has to be willing to follow it across all three.

What motivates me is finding better ways to do more with less — not efficiency for its own sake, but so the business runs smarter and people get freed up for higher-value work.

I live in Greensburg with my wife and our four daughters. I coach girls basketball, still play “old man” baseball, and my wife and I owned and ran a food truck franchise until we sold it — which is a fast education in what it actually feels like to be the owner writing the checks.