A successor CFO preps for his official start date

Sponsored by

Don’t go chasin’ AI trends. Applying AI to the business challenges that matter most to your organization is where the real potential lies. From productivity and workforce transformation to growth and operational efficiency, learn more with PwC.

Tanner Newton clearly heard all the “early bird gets the worm” stuff: In his case, the early bird got the CFO seat.

Newton will step into the top finance role at publicly held Concentra, an occupational health company, on the first of November, but when he arrived at the company in early 2025 as SVP of strategy and finance, he was ultimately just early for the CFO gig.

“Effectively, I’ve been preparing for this since January 2025 when I came in,” Newton said of his CFO post, explaining that it was all “part of the plan” when he was brought on board by outgoing CFO (and incoming CEO) Matt DiCanio.

Newton “spent the better part of the last decade at a private equity shop…focused on growth, strategic advisory to boards, and capital allocation,” he told CFO Brew. “So [I] learned a lot through that channel, but at the time was really looking for an opportunity to get closer to ground-level value creation.”

Into the pool. His personal upskilling at Concentra started almost immediately. “Since I came on board, I was thrown into the fire on the investor relations front,” he explained. “I’ve, at this point, had hundreds of conversations with our investor community. They know me. They know the succession plan that’s been in place.”

What else is Newton doing to get ready? From here until November 1, “it’s about deepening relationships,” he told us. “I’ve already got five or six direct reports right now. I’m going to be adding three more. I’ve got relationships with the folks that I will be adding. They’ve known for some time that this was coming.”

Effective November 1, he’ll be in charge of everything from corporate strategy and real estate, investor relations, treasury, capital markets, corp dev, and procurement, to tax, accounting, FP&A, and reporting.

Concentra is “a very tenured company with folks that’ve been here a long time, a deep bench of folks underneath our senior leadership team,” Newton said. In finance, “we have a fantastic CAO, we’ve got a fantastic controller and a fantastic head of tax that I’m going to lean really heavily on.”

Boss connection. Given the ever-important CFO-CEO connection, Newton’s relationship with CEO DiCanio will be especially crucial, since they’re transitioning into a new working relationship.

Already, they talk “seven days a week,” Newton said. “It’s nice to have the prior CFO right down the hall and I can pick his brain if and when I need to.”

From the experience, he’s picked up a few suggestions for effective succession planning.

“If there’s not a person in house, you need to know that early on so that you can start thinking about if you need to go external,” he said. And if you have identified someone in house, the task is all about “making sure that person is adequately prepared, and almost having them take on responsibility as if they are operating at that next level already, which is something Matt did with me.”