CFO Studio Magazine with David Chambers, CFO, Jaguar Land Rover NA

Making An Impression 10 WWW.CFOSTUDIO.COM 3rd QUARTER 2016 D ay to day, David Chambers, Chief Financial Officer of Jaguar Land Rover North America, consults frequently with the CEO, Joe Eberhardt, a former Chrysler and Mercedes-Benz executive. Eberhardt, who joined JLR in December 2013, is the fourth JLR CEO that Chambers has worked with, and each has had different styles and hot buttons. “I have two goals with the CEO,” says Chambers. “The first is for him to view me as a confidant and consultant. The second is for him to see the value from the finance organization.” Chambers wants to provide the CEO with absolute assurance that he “can look to me from the business analysis perspective and know” the finance team will have data and the answers.” Indeed, when Eberhardt challenged sev- eral executives, including Chambers, to call two customers a week and get their feedback on the products, “I religiously did it,” says Chambers. The exercise was enlightening and he heard some good stories, but he also made a great impression on one particular customer, a business owner who wasn’t around when Chambers phoned. Chambers had left a voicemail, and the customer called back to say he was so struck by the fact that a C-level executive would pick up the phone and call customers that he played the voicemail Chambers had left him for his own Board of Directors. the Land Rover brand set a new high-water mark in the U.S. But back in the summer of ’08, the company had no track record. Ford Motor Co. had acquired Jaguar in 1990 and Land Rover in 2000, but started shopping the brands in mid-2007. Ford needed to focus its investments in core brands and was looking for buyers for non-core brands. When Tata Motors of Mumbai, India, came forward, Chambers, then working for Ford as U.S. vice president of finance for these brands, was a key individual fromNorth America working on the JLR sale. “I had a lot of Ford loyalty, but I said it then and I’ll say it now: It was the right answer for both companies,” Chambers said recently in an interview at the JLR North America headquarters in Mahwah, NJ. “Within Ford, Jaguar Land Rover would have never gotten the capital it needed to survive — or to survive and thrive like we’re doing today — because the demands on Ford from a capital perspective were always going to be huge to support its core business.” Today, JLR is effectively a British company, with headquarters in Coventry, England. The North American branch is a licensed distributorship. All the vehicles come from the U.K., but Chambers and a handful of top execs in New Jersey create the best go-to-market strategy for North America. “I don’t think of myself as a hugely creative person, but I think of myself as an individual who can help influence within the business and sit with the operating teams and come to what I would call the right answer, with everybody walking away saying, ‘We did the right thing for the business,’” says Chambers. Midwestern Sensibilities Chambers, 51, grew up in Fremont, OH, population 18,000. He played sports, was active in Boy Scouts, and was known as the kid who always raised his hand in class. In looks and attitude, he seems typically Midwestern, even bearing a passing resemblance to Christopher Reeve’s Clark Kent of Smallville in the first two Superman movies. Self-confident and never doubting he’d go to college, Chambers received a BS in Finance fromMiami University in Oxford, OH, in 1987, worked a few years in banking, and returned to school for an MBA from Ohio State. There he met an executive from Ford and somewhat casually agreed to an interview with him. That led him into an industry he took to from Day One. Chambers says that he loved that his bosses put him right to work as a financial analyst at Ford’s Dearborn, MI, world headquarters, and that the products were so tangible. (“Everyone knows Ford.”) He married a Dearborn girl (a second-generation Ford employee) and they have a son, 13. Chambers rose through various finance jobs at headquarters and at the St. Louis manufacturing plant. Back in Dearborn, he worked his way up to director, car and truck pricing. Altogether, it was a thorough grounding in finance operations in the U.S. automotive industry. That being said, he found himself in new territory when the sale went through in June 2008. In his first months at Jaguar Land Rover NA, Chambers created organizations for treasury, tax, accounting, compliance, dealer audit, and purchasing. This was “a great learning experience,” he says with Midwestern understatement. “Rarely do you get to come into a large organization — large from a revenue perspective — and get to basically start everything over again.” ( JLR North America’s starting team dwindled to 14 sales and marketing employees and Chambers when the group moved from Irvine in January 2009 to a Mahwah, NJ building owned by JLR.) One of the challenges was to keep everything running while putting the right people in place and starting systems. He focused on the top post in each area and let those he hired decide on next steps. For example, he hired a director of accounting. That individual went out to Detroit and worked with Ford until he understood what the Ford accounting people did. “Then he came back and started working through, ‘What would my accounting organization look like?’ and we started building it from there,” says Chambers. After getting through the stages of survive and stabilize, Chambers and the team’s next focus was to promote growth, especially for the popular Land Rover luxury SUV brand. COVER STORY