Great to talk to you today Chase. To start it off, can you tell us how long you’ve been here at Walsworth, how you got started and how that opportunity came about?

I started at Walsworth in 2022. I was working at a local community bank in their Accounting Department. I had kind of worked through another bank to get a loan for a small business project that didn’t really work out. But the loan officer knew (Walsworth CFO) Jeff Vogel. And there was some conversation between those two.

Jeff really needed to find an assistant controller. And the loan officer said, why don’t you call Chase? Chase is great. Jeff called me and it worked out. So through a mutual friend of ours, I ended up here at Walsworth.

So you started as an Assistant Controller and then got promoted to Controller?

Yeah, so I was the assistant controller for about four years, and now I’ve been the controller for around nine months.

For those, like myself, that don’t fully understand the accounting world, can you just kind of explain and walk us through exactly what a controller is responsible for and what you do?

At a high level, the controller is responsible for the financial statements. And at a more niche level, that includes leading the accounting team and designing processes. It’s designing and enforcing internal controls.

I also help with making sure that the company’s risk posture is appropriate with insurance coverages and stuff like that. I’m also involved in some strategy decisions where, if we make a certain decision, how is that going to impact the financial statements?

But at a high level, it’s the financial statements and everything that’s involved in producing the company’s financial statements. So I get a little involved in accounts receivable and accounts payable and commission accounting and managerial accounting.

And obviously I work closely with payroll to making sure everything is reported appropriately on the financial statements. Another big project would be the annual budget.

Walsworth has 134 departments, and we have to make a budget for every single one of those. So I sit down with a lot of business unit leaders to discuss their budgets and then I compile all that information and I present that to the leadership team and to the board.

You mentioned that before you came to Walsworth, you worked at a bank and worked in banking. What did that entail?

My title at the bank was accounting specialist. It was accounting, but it was not like Walsworth’s accounting, which is a little more complex than a bank.

And I actually spent most of my early career working at McDonald’s and running McDonald’s restaurants. I was a general manager of two McDonald’s restaurants, one in Lexington, Missouri, and one in Brookfield, Missouri.

That must have been a fascinating learning experience.

Well you know, working in the food service industry during COVID, it burns you out pretty quickly. Late in 2020 is when I left McDonald’s and then I started working for the bank. I did that for between a year and a year and a half before I came over here to Walsworth.

Did you figure out at young age that accounting was something you wanted to study? Did you have an aptitude for numbers or math?

I’ve always liked money and I was interested in money. I took personal finance classes in school and I always loved them.

I didn’t grow up with a lot of money and I just kind of felt like, if I wanted to get more out of my life, I needed to learn more about money and how it worked. So that was kind of my step.

I got an associate’s degree in business management, and then I went to UMKC (in Kansas City) and I got my bachelor’s degree in finance. That’s when I went to work for McDonald’s. Since I’ve been here at Walsworth, I’ve been to grad school and earned my graduate degree in accounting (from Missouri State University).

You’re originally from the Brookfield area, correct? When you were presented with the opportunity at Walsworth, what was it that specifically appealed to you?

You know, Walsworth is one of the largest companies around here, but it’s also a family-owned company and I saw it as an opportunity to grow.

At the bank, I felt like I was kind of withering away. I wasn’t really doing work that was challenging. And I felt like Walsworth was an opportunity that was going to keep challenging me. I tell my employees all the time, “Everybody asks themselves when they come into work, is this a place that you can learn and grow?”

Before I got here, I was answering that question every day, no. And I felt like at Walsworth, that answer would be yes.

Here’s kind of a two-fold question for you to ponder: what do you think has allowed the company to be as survivable as it has been over the past nearly 90 years, while many other competitors have fallen by the wayside. And at the same time, from your department’s perspective in accounting, what are the keys to the company’s maintaining that strength into the future?

I would say when Walsworth makes decisions, it’s always looking at the long-term impacts and it’s not, how is this going to improve the income statement next month? Usually Walsworth is looking at, if we do these projects and if we spend this money, how is it going to help one year… two years… five years from now?

I was listening to a podcast recently and the host said, “These companies, they always want to say that they’re gazelles. Well, you want to know who gets eaten? The gazelles.” You want to know who doesn’t get eaten is the elephant. The elephant moves slow and methodically. And I feel like that is Walsworth.

We evaluate big decisions and make them for the long-term growth of the company, nothing short-sighted.

Technologies like AI have touched and impacted lots of different levels throughout the company. How has that impacted accounting?

I think probably the biggest success story that we’ve had so far with AI was that we recently implemented Oracle NetSuite as our new accounting system. We went live with it in July.

In order to do that, your ending balance sheet in one system has to match your beginning balance sheet in the new system. That means you’re going to have your accounts receivable balance, for example, and you’re going to have all these balances for all these customers, thousands of them, and you need to make sure those balances are matching up exactly to what they were in the old system.

We utilized Co-pilot heavily to create comprehensive reconciliations of the ending amount and the beginning amount of our accounting systems. And I would say it saved us hundreds of hours.

Being able to go through that with Co-pilot is probably our biggest success so far.

So it sounds like you definitely view the capabilities as a net positive for what you will be able to accomplish in the future?

Sure, just the user interface is an easy one. When you’re looking at hiring young people, having a system with a user interface that looks and acts like other sites that they’re on all the time is a huge win.

Also the ability to continue to invest and develop their AI capabilities within their own cloud infrastructure. We’ve only been on NetSuite for two months and there’s already a list of AI capabilities that NetSuite is saying they’re ready to plug in whenever we’re ready.

Can you tell us about life outside of work?

I have one cat. I have 13 nieces and nephews. That’s pretty interesting. They range from 19 years old to about 2 years old. So they’re all over the place.

Are your siblings in the area

Yeah, I have two biological brothers, one stepbrother and one stepsister.

And everybody is there around the Marceline/Brookfield area?

Everybody’s in the North Central Missouri area. I have some family up in Trenton and then Chillicothe and Brookfield and then Laclede, which is a really small town.

What about hobbies and interests outside of work?

I really like being outdoors. I like fishing. I like hunting, hunting mostly for deer and for turkey.

I like walking outside. If there’s any opportunity to just be outside in general, like if there’s an opportunity to eat outside, I’d prefer to eat outside. If there’s an opportunity to walk somewhere, I like to walk. My life outside of work is very… casual.

We have a series of fun questions that we ask everybody, and we typically start by asking what’s one interesting, noteworthy, or funny about you that most people would not know?

My funniest one is that I did a puppet show at the Missouri state fair. Does that count? That’s a fun fact, right?

Sure, what were the circumstances of this puppet show?

I was in middle school and my church decided to buy all these puppets and do a puppet show based off of church themes, like little skits with these puppets. And the Baptist ministries invited us down to the state fair to do one of our puppet shows at one of the tents down there.

It seems so silly now that it was like 20 years ago. But we drove down there with our puppets and we did a puppet show down at the state fair. It feels like a fever dream or something. (laughs)

Working as a manager at McDonald’s for that many years, did any crazy or interesting stories come out of that time?

Probably the craziest story was one time where our corporate liaison showed up at the restaurant. They periodically did this unannounced. He came in and ate breakfast and said everything looks good. And he’s like, I’m going to go do a walk around and kind of do a food safety check.

He comes back to me 10 minutes later and he says, “Hey, Chase, can I show you something?” We go into the men’s restroom and there’s sewage backing up into the restaurant. Per the health code, you’re required to close the restaurant because it’s a food safety violation.

Here I am with corporate in the restaurant, this is fantastic. I ended up making some calls to some plumbers. He sticks around. I closed the restaurant. And then the next thing I know, one of my employees passed out, right there in the middle of the lobby. Now I have one of my employees who’s unconscious.

Luckily there was a police officer who happened to be in the lobby still because I hadn’t yet told everybody they had to leave. Anyway, that’s probably the craziest story about a day where everything seemed to go wrong. I think that’s probably the worst day I’ve ever had at work.

That’s when you wonder, do I want to figure out something else with my career?

Yes! We get the restaurant back up and we had to notify the health department that we closed the restaurant due to a food safety issue. When we opened back up, they had to come and do food safety evaluations. Then after everything settled down, here comes the health inspector to do an inspection. At that point, I’m like, “Can everybody just go away?”

Time for our series of favorites questions. Do you have a favorite book

Oh, it’s really lame. My favorite book is a non-fiction book. I actually have it in my office. It’s called I’ll Teach You to Be Rich.

It’s the best personal finance book I’ve ever read, and I point anyone who asks me for advice to that book.

What about a favorite movie or TV show?

I have several. I’m kind of a movie geek.

I’ll start with TV shows. I really like Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. And then probably one more that’s more recent that I really, really like is Severance. It is fantastic.

With movies, I really like the movie Signs that came out in the early 2000s with Mel Gibson, and then the animated Pixar movie, Coco, that came out in 2017, or something like that. I love that movie.

Do you have a favorite meal or type of food?

I don’t know if it’s my favorite, but I do like hot dogs. (laughs)

I joke around with people that I like hot dogs and they kind of know that I like hot dogs. You know, there’s not much better than eating a real hot dog at a baseball game.

What about maybe the best vacation destination or best trip you ever took?

I love the beach, but if I could only go on one trip for the rest of my life, I’d probably say Chicago. I really like Chicago. They have the Field Museum there and I’m kind of a nerd.

They’ve got all the artifacts and the dinosaurs and they got stuff from ancient civilizations and ancient Greece. They have mummies there. And I love the Shedd Aquarium, which is really incredible, again because I’m a nerd, I suppose.

I’ve ridden one of those lift bikes down the lakefront from Wrigley Field all the way down to Chinatown and that was really fun. Chicago in the summer is really nice.

If you had a personalized coffee mug, what would it say?

I asked my work friends what it would say, and they said, “bad day to be a spreadsheet.”

Do you have maybe a favorite memory or accomplishment from your career that you’re most proud of?

There’s probably two things. One is earning my CPA license. That was about 18 months of something close to pure misery. (laughs) Every single day, I would come to work, I would go home, I would study for the CPA exam and I would go to sleep. And on the weekends, I would wake up, I would study for the CPA exam all day long and then I would go to sleep. That was pretty much 18 months of my life.

And just the amount of stuff I learned and the grind of doing it and then coming out at the end a CPA was really gratifying.

Another one would probably be when I was at McDonald’s, my last year was my last full year as a GM. I was recognized as an outstanding general manager. I went to Las Vegas for a ceremony at the McDonald’s convention. And less than 10% of GMs get that award, so just to be recognized as one of the top general managers in the country, that was really gratifying.