19 - Accentuate the Positive

Summary

We shall never know all the good a simple smile can do.

—Mother Teresa

A lot of interesting partnerships began in 1994. Samuel L. Jackson teamed up with John Travolta in Pulp Fiction. Michael Jackson wed Elvis Presley's daughter Lisa Marie. Jeff Gillooly, ex-husband of U.S. Olympian figure skater Tonya Harding, teamed up with bodyguard Shawn Eckardt to disable Harding's chief competitor, Nancy Kerrigan.

None of those couplings yielded the desired results.

But, in a coupling that would grow and prosper and stand the test of time, Cheryl Ferruccio, leading with a smile, interviewed for, and was subsequently hired, as an executive assistant at Kronos.

Mark Ain had an admin at the time. So, Cheryl's first assignment was assisting CFO Paul Lacy. But given both how much time Mark spent in Paul's office, and Kronos’ relatively small size at the time, Cheryl often had crossover duties that had her also working closely with the company's founder and CEO.

“Initially I worked for Paul,” detailed Cheryl. “But this was just shortly after Kronos had gone public, toward the end of 1992, so Mark and Paul, and also Mary Jane Conary, were always preparing to go on the road on trips to meet investors. So, I worked very closely with them. Plus, especially in those days, when Kronos had only about 400 employees, everybody absolutely knew everyone in the company.”

More than simply someone who took notes, Cheryl quickly became a cog in the core investor-relations team, compiling key data, and even had the responsibility, and honor, of calling in the quarterly numbers to the folks at Nasdaq.

“That was the beginning of a stretch where Kronos went up in earnings and profitability quarter over quarter and year over year at a pace that separated the company from most other companies,” said Mark. “In fact, after a while, the only software company with a longer streak of consecutive quarters of revenue and profitability growth was Microsoft. And Cheryl was a key player in terms of getting us ready to go out and leverage those numbers to attract more investment in the company.”