David Clark-Joseph
Verified Expert in Finance
Finance Expert
New York, NY, United States
Toptal member since February 1, 2020
A dual law and MBA degree holder, David built M&A models for $500+ million deals, led integrations that delivered $200 million in synergies, and placed venture investments returning 4x+. He's worked in M&A at publicly-traded firms such as NCR and Mitel, and as a CFO for private equity firms and startups. As a freelancer, David leverages his operational and deal-related skill set to advise clients on strategy, modeling, and investment decisions.
Career Highlights
Education Highlights
Certification Highlights
Case Studies
Industry Expertise
- Agriculture
- Finance
- Venture Capital & Private Equity
- Manufacturing
- Software
- Telecommunications
- Financial Modeling
- Project Management
Other Expertise
- Business Strategy
- CFO
- Financial Modeling
- Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A)
- Value Creation
Work Experience
Head of Finance, VP of Corporate Development
Kings Distributed Systems
- Helped progress the platform from concept to closed beta to an open beta with 1,330 users in the first phase of enrollment. The platform is processing in excess of 50 million distributed compute tasks between individual users and scientific computing projects “Asteroids@home” and “Electrodynamics@home”.
- Identified opportunities, created business cases, and secured leadership buy-in on new product opportunities for instant compute groups and green energy compute groups.
- Sourced initial leads, progressed relationships, and negotiated strategic partnerships with LG and Magna International.
- Built the detailed operating model and FP&A plan used to articulate strategic alternatives and track business performance.
- Crafted narratives, designed and built pitch decks, and walked potential investors through unit economics, CAC modeling, the business model and financial plan to support the $2 million fundraise.
Senior Manager, M&A
Mitel Networks
- Led financial and operational due diligence, target operating model design, SPA analysis, integration planning, and integration program management for two transformative deals - $530 million acquisition of ShoreTel in 2017, and $500 million divestiture of Mavenir in 2016.
- Led financial analysis, the negotiation process for the stock purchase and transition service agreements, the integration/divestiture planning, and integration program management for the tuck-in acquisition of Toshiba's telecommunications assets and the divestiture of DeTeWe systems integrator unit.
- Owned deal funnel progression for inbound and outbound opportunities, delivering end-to-end deal analysis, diligence, negotiation, and execution for seven acquisition and divestitures ranging from $30 million to $2 billion.
- Crafted a repeatable deal playbook for acquisitions and divestitures ranging from $10 million to $1 billion, covering step-by-step directions for deal flow analysis, financial and operational diligence, frameworks for third-party diligence advisor engagement and utilization, integration/carveout planning and transition services agreements/program management.
- Led master planning including the creation of target operating model, 90-365 day plans, dependency mapping, and program management for integrations of ShoreTel and Toshiba acquisitions and transition service agreements for both the Mavenir and DeTeWe divestitures. Drove the ShoreTel integration to 95% completion in 12 months, delivering over $100 million in synergies.
- Selected and deployed the integration management application "eKnow" to 150 cross-functional users.
Director of Strategy
Bild Alternative Investments
- Led a $3 million seed-stage VC fund within a family of funds with $50+ in assets under management. Responsibilities included lead sourcing, opportunity evaluation, preparation, and presentation of materials to the investment committee as well as deal execution. The fund led early investments in Predikto (bought by United Technologies) and OBMedical (bought by Philips), as well as Hydrostor and Artemis, which cumulatively led to returns of 4x+ capital invested.
- Served as an operating partner and CFO for portfolio company American Fiber Packaging, a green tech manufacturer, designing a strategic shift to build customer demand with imported products and leading an investment in fixed assets to lower unit costs helping to drive sales from $65,000 to $1.2 million per annum while increasing gross margin by 1200 bps in one year.
- Led the spin-off of a lower margin business unit that improved cash flow by 45% year over year while managing sales analytics to score customers by delivery cost and profitability, improving margins by 12%.
- Oversaw the monthly FP&A review and audit for three portfolio companies ranging from $1 million - $5 million in planned revenue.
- Developed brand strategy and led product development for new business (greenfield investment) "Mantis Organics." Designed formulas for new food products based on market research, sourced premium organic ingredients from dedicated suppliers, selected a contract manufacturing partner, and managed label design and creation.
Strategic Planning Manager
NCR
- Served as a business partner to the VP of Services Technology (Oracle enterprise services and managed services SaaS product offerings) that supported NCR services responsible for 50% of revenue. Managed FP&A, expense and capital annual strategic planning, and forecasting for a $46 million budget of operating expense, $50 million in capital expenditures, and tracking labor across 350 FTE between 2012-2014.
- Owned M&A IT financial due diligence, value capture modeling, post-close integration planning, and tracking synergies and costs to achieve for the transformative acquisitions of $650 million Retalix and $1.2 billion Radiant, as well as tuck-in vertical integration acquisition of vendor Transoft between 2012-2014.
- Analyzed ATM data and proved the business case for an alliance with Intel to develop remote incident resolution, saving $5.5 million in reduced ATM service calls. Defined the business case for strategic cooperation with PayPal, integrations into POS/ATM in 2013.
- Re-engineered the expense outlook process to enable single-point forecasting and dashboards to facilitate ad hoc analysis in SAP BusinessObjects XI, saving over 200 hours per year.
- Designed an improvement to the Access database to use purchase order numbers as common keys, facilitating SQL queries linking PO receipts to assets on the balance sheet, reducing capital expenditure verification time by 80% to four hours per month, saving 60 hours annually, that was reallocated to M&A and strategic alliances in 2012.
- Took leadership function in PMO rollout of PlanView project software to 1,000 IT users in 2013. Met all PMO process stakeholders, establishing rapport and ensuring stakeholder delight and satisfaction with an open door policy, check-ins, and training. Led to increasingly granular project definition and quantification, and simplified measuring and reporting project KPIs. In the first three years, we saved over 2000 hours of the PMO and IT dept, resulting in a project IRR of 49% and an mIRR of 34% (as interim cash flows couldn't be reinvested in this project).
- Owned FP&A for an IT strategy and architecture, and a $3 million budget with 50 FTE in 2011.
- Owned the investment evaluation for new IT projects in 2011. Owned the process for quantifying and forecasting business benefits for over 70 million annually. Implemented mIRR to take into account when interim cash flows could not be reinvested at the same return as the project.
Education
Master of Business Administration (MBA) in Finance
Ohio State University - Columbus, Ohio, USA
Juris Doctor in Law
Florida State University - Tallahassee, Florida, USA
Certifications
Effective Negotiating
Karrass
Effective Communications and DISC
Manager Tool
The Rosenfield Family Prize for Excellence in Security Analysis
The Ohio State University (https://fisher.osu.edu/academic-departments/department-finance/programs/student-investment-management/rosenfield-family-prize)
Certification in Financial and Valuation Modeling in Excel
Wall Street Prep
Skills
Finance
Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A), Financial Modeling, Valuation, Due Diligence, M&A Modeling, M&A Reporting, Cross-border M&A, Mergers & Acquisitions (M&A), Value Creation, Incentive Simulations, Blockchain, Private Equity, CFO, M&A (Buy-side), Capital Budgeting, Seed Fundraising, Cash Flow Modeling, Business Taxation, Corporate Finance, Valuation Modeling, Investment Thesis, Investment Decision-making
Output Software
Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel, Excel 2010
Data & Analysis Software
Capital IQ, Oracle ERP, SQL, Tableau, Pandas
Geographic Expertise
North America, Canada, United States, Europe
Industry Expertise
Software, Telecommunications, Renewable Energy, Agriculture, New Business Ventures, Venture Capital, Tokenomics
Other
Operating Models, Target Operating Models, Negotiation, Transition Service Agreement (TSA), Post-merger Integration, Synergy Cost Project Management, Business Strategy, Strategy Planning, Strategic Planning, Team Leadership, Team Management, Project Management, Project Budget Management, Program Management, PMO, Management, Data Analytics, Financial Analysis, Finance, Crypto, Cryptocurrency, Performance Enhancement, Performance, Performance Improvement, Data-driven Performance Improvement, S&P Capital IQ, Term Sheet Negotiations, Share Purchase Agreements, Business Development, Python, Partnership Structuring, Partnership Analysis, B2B Partnerships, Enterprise SaaS, Manufacturing, SaaS, Information Technology, Information & Communications Technology (ICT), Platforms, Blockchain Platforms, Blockchain & Cryptocurrency, Stakeholder Analysis, Incentive Plan Design, Electronic Payments, Point of Sale, CPG, Manufacturers, Market Entry, Cloud Computing, Operational Modeling, Greenfield, Investment Ideas, Investment Analysis, Portfolios, SAP BusinessObjects (BO), Investor Relations, Competitive Strategy, Competitor Analysis & Profiling, New Business Development, Partnership Identification, New Product Development, Business Cases, Token Allocation, Modeling, Ethereum, ICO, Angel Investing, Fundraising Consultant, Strategy, Term Sheet Advisory, New Product Business Cases, Natural Language Processing (NLP), Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT)
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