Cheryl Sjolseth

Cheryl Sjolseth has spent her career in finance environments where the numbers have to be right, because everyone is watching them.

Her path runs through some of the largest and most complex finance operations in the country. She holds two degrees from Arizona State University, one in accounting and one in finance. Her career includes PwC, one of the Big Four accounting firms; JPMorgan Chase, one of the largest banks in the United States; Vestar Development, a shopping center developer and operator with 30 million square feet of open air retail across the western US; Republic Services, a publicly traded environmental services company; and Medicis, a pharmaceutical company. Different industries, one constant: real finance, done at standard.

That range matters more than it first appears. A shopping center developer worries about tenants and leasing. A pharmaceutical company worries about pipelines and patents. A bank worries about risk. The accounting rules, the discipline, and the scrutiny are the same everywhere, and that is what she took from one industry to the next. By the time a finance professional has seen that many balance sheets, there is very little a business can show her that she has not already priced, audited, or analyzed.

From there she became Controller of Callison, a Seattle based international architecture firm that grew to about 900 employees. Running finance for a creative firm of that size means accounting for every cost of a business that sells something as intangible as design, and keeping it honest anyway. It is one thing to keep books for a factory with inventory on the floor. It is another to keep them for talent, time, and ideas, where the numbers only mean something if the person reading them asks the right questions.

Since 2015 she has been Chief Financial Officer of Investco Financial Corporation, a family of real estate holdings and operating companies in business since 1983. The portfolio is diversified in the most literal sense of the word: industrial, commercial, agricultural, and residential property across five western states, more than 100 industrial tenants across 4.7 million square feet, roughly 250 commercial tenants, 1,900 acres of farmland, and 600 acres of vineyards. Investco describes its own focus as creating and building lasting value for generations. Portfolios like that are not managed quarter to quarter. They are managed the way families and small business owners actually think: what do we own, what does it earn, and what will it be worth when we pass it on.

Here is what that record means for a client of The Orion Companies. The person keeping this company honest about costs has spent her career in rooms where a projection meets a real balance sheet. When Orion quotes you a price for a build, when we tell you a workflow will pay for itself, or when we tell you it will not, that judgment carries a CFO's discipline behind it. Cheryl has approved budgets, run the numbers through audit grade scrutiny, and lived with the consequences of figures that turned out to be wrong. She does not accept them from us, and she will not let us sell them to you.

Her side of the company is the other half of our honesty promise. Anyone can promise to tell you the truth. Backing it requires people who can tell, precisely, what the truth of your numbers is. That is the discipline she brings, and it is the reason our evaluations hold up after the meeting ends.

Numbers tell the truth about a business. My career has been about making sure of it, first at big firms, then as CFO of a portfolio where a guess does not survive the month. At The Orion Companies it works the same way. When we tell you what something will cost and what it will save, the numbers are real.