A Passion for Operations

Steve Player talks with Mark Blinn, SVP, CFO, and Latin American operations of Flowserve Corp.

With 14,000-plus employees in more than 50 countries, Flowserve moves, controls, and protects the flow of materials in some of the world's most critical industries, including oil and gas. In Blinn, Flowserve has a CFO who's not afraid to get down among the pumps and valves of the company's financials.

Steve Player: The Latin American operations part of your job title is an interesting twist ...
Mark Blinn: Yes. This is a company that's very focused on the development of its people. As part of overall succession planning, we want to make sure that leaders get relevant experience in multiple areas. As I speak Spanish and I've lived in Mexico, the company saw an opportunity to slot me into a role with responsibility for our pump-and-seal operations in Latin America. We have a great operation down there -- it's long-standing, with a lot of very talented people -- it just needed some focus, some energy, and a strategic overview.

SP: How big a part of the business is it?
Blinn: It has historically been less than 10 percent of our business, but it's certainly growing. We have a lot of opportunities in front of us. Look at Brazil, for example, a country that was designated as investment-grade last year. They have a tremendous amount of resources. They've been making substantial investments. And in general -- though we're all aware of the exceptions -- there's a very strong migration toward stability in the region.
There's a tremendous amount of talent in the Latin America region. When people talk about emerging markets, they often look to developing countries. China's a great example of this, and we've seen a tremendous amount of movement there to take advantage of this opportunity. And while there is a well-established reservoir of talent there, we are also seeing the emergence of very well educated talent in other parts of the world. I think that's one of the distinguishing elements in Latin America as well.

SP: It must be a very dynamic environment. How did your finance skills help to get you ready for that job?
Blinn: I don't always know what skill set I pull from at any given time! Earlier in my career I was a lawyer, which teaches you advocacy, but I think that more importantly it teaches you how to say what people don't necessarily want to hear. The finance discipline gives you an appreciation of risks and opportunities and the ability to interpret them through the common filter of financial information and to draw conclusions from this. And then the leadership skills that I've learned throughout my career have helped me work with what is a very different culture.

In addition to the finance roles, I've picked up some other roles as well, in global sourcing and in real estate. I'm a very operational CFO. I like to get out from behind my desk and understand the business.

SP: I want to come back to your background in just a minute, but let's go back to when you stepped into the CFO role at Flowserve in 2003. You knew that the financials you inherited were not pristine, and you knew that you'd eventually have to sign the financial statements. Why did you decide to take this challenge on?
Blinn: I was certainly aware that the company had had some challenges, and I had a pretty good sense that they were going into their second restatement of financials. But as I looked around and took into consideration the compliance environment at the time, I could say, "This could happen to a lot of companies."
More importantly, I spent time with a lot of the people who are on the management team right now, and I knew that these were really good people. And then for me, personally, it was an opportunity to become a public company CFO. I knew that there was a challenge in front of me, but I thought, "You know -- it's worth it."