Paul McEntee is a financial management expert specializing in privately held middle-market companies. He has over 30 years of experience as a strong financial and strategic partner to CEOs and business owners seeking to accelerate growth and transform their businesses.
Paul joins The Evanston Group as Vice President of Finance and member of the senior leadership team providing financial leadership and numeric vision. He is integral to plans for scaling the company’s growth and modernizing reporting systems and processes that will strengthen business insights and decision making.
He has a proven record of empowering organizations to establish metrics and produce meaningful and insightful financial reporting that goes far beyond the standard P&L and historical-looking accuracy. He builds proactive capability for real-time insights into cost structures, risk, margins, and trend lines to empower teams across an enterprise to do their jobs more effectively and operate strategically every day.
As The Evanston Group looks to accelerate its strong track record of growth, Paul’s expertise expands the company’s servicing and impact with top global pharmaceutical, medical device and other leaders across the life sciences industry. These companies count on The Evanston Group for high-caliber consultants and one-of-a-kind experts critical to their R&D, clinical trials, and efforts that move disease treatment options, life-saving drugs, game-changing medical devices and new patient-centric and personalized medicine therapies to market faster.
Over his career, Paul has steered companies through the full gamut of financial complexity across every market cycle. He began his career with 20 years of public accounting experience. He stepped into his first job as CFO weeks before the 2008 financial crisis hit. Paul managed the company’s cash flow through the Great Recession, reducing expenses by over a million dollars, and eventually positioning the successful sale of the business.
Most recently, Paul has provided CFO services and financial consulting to a range of medium-sized, private businesses. In one instance, he engaged in under 24 hours, when a CEO was convinced its CFO was embezzling. Paul stepped in to guide the company, hire and onboard a new controller and migrate the company onto an entirely new accounting system. Within a year’s time, he moved the company from a potential crisis and marginal profitability to its best year ever.
Paul has positioned many fast growing companies like The Evanston Group, to achieve their long-term vision and sidestep challenges that can come with greater growth. Every business, no matter how successful, requires strong financial vision to keep improving at what they do, and to establish the reality checks and accountabilities essential to growth and profitability.
He graduated from Loyola University Chicago with a Bachelor of Business Administration in accounting and earned his MBA in finance and information systems from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Paul is an avid sailor, occasional golfer and enjoys hiking, fishing and being outdoors.
