Steve Mitchell had not been working for Irish telecom giant Eircom for even half a year before he decided that it was time to explore other opportunities.

For the previous 4 months, the seasoned operations executive had been commuting weekly to Dublin, Ireland, from his home in the United Kingdom as he sought to nurture Eircom’s waning mobile customer relationships.  

However, Eircom’s CFO upended Mitchell’s plans by offering him the position of corporate finance director.

“I went over there for a few months and ended up staying for 4-1/2 years,” recalls Mitchell, who still seems surprised by the CFO’s job offer. “I hadn’t even worked in finance during the previous 8 years.”

Over the next 18 months, Mitchell’s responsibilities would expand to include investor relations, treasury, M&A, and running Eircom’s cap ex committee.

Besides regularly delivering investor presentations, at one point Mitchell found himself before the European Commission, defending Eircom’s competitive position relative to recent telecom market consolidation.

“Since those first couple of years with Eircom, nothing has really phased me,” remarks Mitchell, whose appointment came as Eircom was making the business case with its board and investors to lock in a first-mover advantage when it came to rolling out a 4G network across Ireland.  

Given the breadth of Mitchell’s functional responsibilities, it soon became clear that he was also expected to rally the internal finance team to bring forth the financial insights required to move the business case forward.      

“The finance people working on the fiber rollout business case could have either sat and fiddled with spreadsheets for months or else put the bit between their teeth and realized that they were about to drive the biggest decision that the business was going to make all year,” comments Mitchell, who adds that while his years at Eircom revealed to him the complexity of leadership decision-making, they also exposed how finance looms large.

Says Mitchell: “A couple of really good pieces of analysis from the finance team ended up driving management and board decisions with regard to where that cap ex would go and whether we were ready to make the move.” –Jack Sweeney