Who am I?
Hi, I am John Zott, and I am the principal consultant at Bates Creek Consulting. Bates Creek Consulting provides accounting and finance support to growing government contracting firms using best-in-class systems like JAMIS PRIME. Our team of outsourced controllers is fast, accurate and timely. If you are interested in an outsourced CFO/Controller, we can provide a cost effective option for firms up to 150 consultants.
I have been a Chief Financial Officer for more than 20 years and have worked in consulting and consumer focused firms for more than 35 years. The factor that ties my career together is dealing with rapid growth. Rapid growth implies rapid investment of capital, hiring of staff, offering new and different product/service combinations to the customer base.
I have experience in consulting, government contracting, consumer, technology, software, food, and wholesale sectors. I’ve raised raised money through bank financing’s, public offerings and private placements of debt/equity, and have bought and sold businesses. For 12 years I worked as a sector analyst for long-short equity hedge fund firms in the San Francisco area, focused on high-growth firms, assessing strategy, financing and management.
This wide range of experience has helped me become an expert in how to help firms develop and execute quality growth and I speak and write on related issues. My blog is where I share my thoughts about being a CFO. a senior executive, a coach and an advisor and my best ideas about running a growth company today.
I was one of the top accounting students in Michigan in 1981, passed the CPA exam on my first attempt and worked for Peat, Marwick & Mitchell, auditing J.C. Penney and a series of automobile parts suppliers. After KPMG, I worked my way from auditor to manager, to Controller to CFO. I had the opportunity to do a couple of public offerings including taking West Marine public. Since then I have been CFO a couple of technology firms, CEO of a startup, CFO of Northern California’s largest Mexican grocer and CFO of an Inc. 5000 government consulting firm. The one thing that unites my experience is that these were all growth company’s.
I obtained a doctorate at Golden Gate University in 2008 where I was awarded the “doctoral student of the year” honors. I still teach finance in the Master of Science in Finance program at Golden Gate University.