Helena High grad is a trailblazer for women chief financial officers
A Helena High grad is one of the few dozen women who hold the position of chief financial officer at a Fortune 500 company.
Pamela Knous, Helena High class of '72 and executive vice president and CFO of Supervalu, the third-largest supermarket company in the country, was in town this week to address the Helena Area Chamber of Commerce annual banquet, and she also took an hour to meet with several classes worth of business students from Carroll College to talk about her career path.
Knous, 54 and a Minnesota native, lived in Helena for several years as a teenager when her father, Howard, was manager of the Helena branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.
She began her career in public accounting, spending 14 years with KPMG before moving into the private sector with Vons supermarkets in Los Angeles in 1991. Knous said Vons was one of her clients for several years at KPMG, allowing her an up-close look at the company that was invaluable when the firm offered her a chance to join its management team.
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Groceries may sound like a boring, low-tech business with low margins and little innovation, but Knous said she finds the work challenging.
"At the end of the day we are getting food on your table in great variety," she said. "This is an industry that is committed to that basic need and I find it very exciting."
After leaving Helena, Knous attended Carleton College in Minnesota before earning two bachelor's degrees, in mathematics and business administration, from the University of Arizona.
One of her top accomplishments at Supervalu was the takeover of a large portion of Albertsons, including the Northern Rockies region that includes the two stores in Helena.
With little geographic overlap between the existing Supervalu stores and the newly acquired Albertsons markets, Knaus said much of the work of absorbing the new company took place behind the scenes.
"Most of our integration was happening in corporate and home office and adnimistrative, non-customer-facing activities," she said. "The biggest challenge is getting on common systems, and the (information technology) environment is so huge it will take us four years to get onto common platforms."
Despite the fact that everyone needs to eat, no matter how weak or strong the economy is, Knous said the grocery business faces its own unique issues when times are tough.
"The challenge is to offer value," she said. "You're trying to stretch your grocery spend as far as possible." So among other tactics, the company has beefed up its ready-to-eat meal offerings, hoping to appeal to people who used to go out to eat two or three times a week but are trying to cut back without losing convenience.
She said that there's still a lack of gender balance in the corner offices of the country's biggest firms -- as of last summer there were 38 female CFOs in the Fortune 500 -- but she doesn't expect the imbalance to be as significant in another generation. Knous noted that there were very few women in her college math and business classes, and that she was just one of two women in a group of 25 hired out of college to work at KPMG.
"You're at least 50-50 now," she told Carroll women at her talk. "And those issues don't really exist anymore. Enough of us have gone before, and today it's all about the person and what they can bring to the opportunity."
Reporter John Harrington: john.harrington@helenair.com
or 447-4080