The CFO Who Turned Around a Struggling Pittsburgh Parts Manufacturer

When Linda Park joined a 90-year-old Pittsburgh precision parts manufacturer as chief financial officer, the company had less than three weeks of payroll cash on hand and a supplier base that had begun demanding payment upfront.

"I came in during the part of a turnaround nobody wants to talk about publicly," Park said. "We weren't optimizing anything. We were making sure people got paid on Friday."

Park's first moves were unglamorous: renegotiating payment terms with the company's ten largest suppliers, cutting a slow-moving portion of inventory that had tied up cash for years, and postponing a planned equipment purchase that leadership had treated as untouchable.

Eighteen months later, the company has rebuilt a cash reserve covering roughly three months of operating expenses and has resumed limited hiring after a hiring freeze. Park credits much of the recovery to transparency with employees about the company's financial condition, a departure from the previous leadership's more guarded communication style.

"People can handle bad news," she said. "What they can't handle is bad news they find out wasn't the whole story."

The company's ownership has said Park will remain in the CFO role through at least the next two fiscal years.