What you can control — KJ Tjon

KJ Tjon's first CFO job ended the week it started. She had just been promoted to CFO of Winstar International when Winstar filed Chapter 11 — one of the spectacular early-2000s telecom bankruptcies. *"I had no idea what was going on,"* she says of the moment. But the next decade resolved that confusion: a partnership at Alvarez & Marsal, then CFO seats at Hawker Beechcraft, Epiq Systems, and Alorica, then three board director chairs. The career was built on the discipline of working through what you can't control to find what you can.

“Focus on what you can control” is KJ’s signature line. It sounds passive — almost stoic. Her practice of it is the opposite. The line carries because of the move-set she’s accumulated for navigating events she didn’t pick: the relationships she builds before she needs them, the discipline of telling people the bad news first, the diversity pipeline she demands from HR, and the team she keeps in place rather than replaces. The famous line is what the moves point at.

A career built on what you couldn’t have controlled#

KJ’s career has been shaped by events she didn’t choose. The Winstar Chapter 11 was the first; the pattern repeated. Hawker Beechcraft was already over-leveraged when she walked in — Goldman Sachs and OMERS had bought the business at the 2008 peak, right before Lehman, and levered it up just as private-aviation demand started shrinking. At Epiq Systems, an activist shareholder showed up shortly after she arrived; her CEO there, Tom Olson, modeled the response she still cites — calm, cool, and collected while she got hot.

You could read all of that as bad luck. KJ reads it as the discipline-formation arc. The decade at Alvarez & Marsal between Winstar and Hawker turned the early panic into a method. She came out of it knowing what to do when the room is on fire — and just as importantly, what not to do.

Focus on what you can control.

The first 100 days are relationship work#

KJ’s first-100-days playbook is relationships, not strategy. The order matters. First: understand from the CEO what they think the true business drivers are — what’s actually critical in the next six months. Then the executive team. Then the finance team — the cadence, who does what, the definition of “close” (every company defines it differently). Then the external surface: lenders, investors, ratings agencies. “I’ve been in companies where they had not met a CFO for three years,” she says of the agency relationships in particular, “and you wonder why your rating is in the tank.”

The mechanical version: there’s a difference between knowing the business drivers and being told them. The drivers KJ chases are the ones the CEO names in the first week. Aligning the goals before driving anything is, in her practice, the entire game.

The first thing you got to do is understand from the CEO what they think are really the true business drivers — finance needs to support that.

The diversity pipeline as a CFO discipline#

KJ’s framing of diversity in finance is operational, not aspirational. The mechanism: push back on HR when the candidate slate keeps looking the same. Build the pipeline before you need it — the first round of diverse candidates may not be hires, but the next will be.

The geographic asymmetry matters and rarely gets named. In Atlanta, the African-American pipeline is deep — universities, professional networks, scale. In Kansas (where she ran finance at Hawker Beechcraft), the pool is smaller, so the pipeline work is harder. The answer isn’t to abandon the goal in Kansas. It’s to recognize that the goal requires more upstream work and to do that work explicitly.

Her other mechanism is less obvious but more useful: skip-level lunches with two or three people at a time, not one-on-one. Direct reports get awkward one-on-one because the CFO is intimidating; three at a time creates enough of a peer environment that real things get said.

I can't just have only old white guys in these jobs. Come up with different candidates.

The CEO-CFO test is private disagreement#

The most useful piece of CEO-CFO advice in KJ’s playbook is to test the relationship before accepting the job. “Get as much exposure to the CEO as possible before taking on the role.” Where does the CEO come from? A CEO with a finance background may micromanage; a CEO from sales is more likely to let the CFO do the work. The default is the default — and worth checking against the candidate sitting across from you.

The deeper test is whether the CFO can disagree in private. If the CEO can’t take that, the working relationship breaks at the first hard quarter. Tom Olson — Epiq’s CEO when the activist arrived shortly after KJ joined, and the model she still cites for calm under fire — passed the test. He took her advice when he agreed with it, ignored it when he didn’t, told her his reasoning either way.

You want to be able to walk in their office, close the door, and say: look, this makes no sense.

What to listen for#

The full episode runs longer on the Winstar Chapter 11 cold open, KJ’s flying-lessons stint at Hawker (Sundowners — single-engine prop planes — she never got certified because “a little bit of knowledge is very dangerous when it comes to piloting planes”), and her warning about “shadow finance” — the duplicate FP&A teams that show up in operating units when central finance doesn’t serve its internal customers. KJ’s three-word descriptor is Straight Forward. Athletic. Reader. Listen at /podcast/ep-003-kj-tjon; for the longer conversation across the catalogue, see /topics/modern-finance-function or /topics/talent-equity.