Robert Selwyn Bloom
Bob Bloom, CFO for Heifer International, aims to end hunger and poverty worldwide.And he helped streamline the process.
Life, no matter how hard you try to simplify it, isn’t some cut-and-dried balance sheet. Debits and credits don’t fall into easy categories. You can’t expect to sit down and have it all add up and even out.
Yet Bob Bloom’s life has the look of a clean ledger. As a certified public accountant, he has spent years working with complex business numbers, steering the financial ships of companies with millions and even billions of dollars hanging in the balance. Starting as one of thousands of accountants in the famed Arthur Andersen firm, Bloom climbed the corporate ladder and in the process raised a family and moved from the suburbs of Chicago to a home in west Little Rock.
For the past eight years Bloom has taken on the mantle of chief financial officer for Heifer International, the nonprofit organization headquartered in downtown
Little Rock dedicated to the lofty goal of “ending poverty and world hunger once and for all.”
Heifer International is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year. From his special vantage point, Bloom says with confidence that Heifer “provides the spark” that moves families around the world closer to financial stability. Working with small farms in Kenya to the minister of agriculture of Cambodia, Bloom guides Heifer into a more complex financial future that remains focused on pulling as many people as possible out of poverty.
“[Bob] had spent his whole career [before Heifer] in the for-profit world,” says Pierre Ferrari, president and chief executive officer of Heifer International. “I did the same. People think we know how to walk in and immediately improve the nonprofit sector and of course we don’t. Bob has the discipline required for the work. What is not so obvious is that he brought in a religious background and a sense of compassion and optimism. He brought in a knowledge for systems building that is robust. He has an ability to get stuff done.”
For Bloom, Heifer’s mission helps put in perspective the work that he does. The numbers that are part of his daily life are only means to a charitable end.
“Seeing the results of some of the things I have played a small part in is really strong and a great thing.”
Bloom, the oldest of five children, grew up in the suburbs of Chicago and in the shadow of the large Catholic family that had captured the imagination of the nation.
“My father had this unfortunate situation growing up,” Bloom recalls. “His father was absent. That actually became the foundation for how he lived his life. His motto was ‘Family First.’ This was the early ’60s and President Kennedy and Camelot was very intriguing to him. We weren’t Catholics but that family was a model. My father had read somewhere that the Kennedy family children would do book reports at the dinner table. We would rotate kids and have to prepare a book report and give the whole family the synopsis over dinner. We had to dress a certain way and we’re not allowed to wear jeans at the table. We had a curfew at dinner and could not be late. He was trying to craft a better outcome for us.”
Bloom’s father was an accountant who worked in downtown Chicago. The family lived a good 30-minute train ride away.
“We would all pile in a station wagon and pick [Dad] up at the train station after work,” Bloom says. “We had dinner at 6 o’clock. My dad was very strong on chores. We had to paint fences, shovel snow and we had paper routes. I had a paper route from 10-years-old until I was in high school.”
Though Bloom was short and barely made it past 100 pounds by the time he was in high school, he considered himself “addicted to sports,” playing basketball, baseball, tennis and wrestling at every opportunity. He knew he wasn’t destined
for sports superstardom but “I had a lot of want to.”
Sports also provided the chance for Bloom and his father to bond.
“My dad and I had that in common,” Bloom recalls. “He would take me to White Sox [baseball] games. He would be reading a newspaper story about some sports even while watching a baseball game on TV. Sports would give us a common conversation.”
When it came time to leave high school, Bloom applied to various colleges near where he lived but did so more out of reflex than passion.
“I knew that I was going to college but I really didn’t know what I wanted to do,” Bloom says. “I ended up choosing the University of Illinois. It had better tuition. My father said since you don’t know what you want to do, get a general business degree. My first semester I took my first accounting course and liked it. But I came back from my first semester with a 3.5 and we were on the 5.0 grading scale. My dad said those grades didn’t get it and that I would be paying for everything on my own if I didn’t improve. I came back the next semester with a 5.0. It was a matter of getting engaged.”
AFFINITY AND ABILITY
Bloom’s family affinity and ability for accounting did not take long to surface.
“My cost accounting teacher pulled me aside and said, ‘You’re very good at this. This could be your career.’ Everybody was looking for that kind of encouragement and that definitely resonated with me.”
Being a standout accounting student led Bloom to a job as a public accountant for Chicago’s Arthur Andersen, considered one of the big five accounting firms in the United States at that time.
“They were headquartered in Chicago and had 2,000 professionals working in downtown Chicago,” Bloom says. “Arthur Andersen was huge. If you were going into public accounting, that was the firm you wanted to work for.”
Bloom gained valuable experience in his eight plus years at Arthur Andersen. He received more at the accounting firm than a couple of impressive lines on his resume.
“My wife [Jill] was a couple of years behind me at Arthur Andersen,” Bloom says. “We worked together on a project in South Bend. She had a boyfriend at the time. The younger people at the firm would go out to Rush Street or to outings at Wrigley Field. We traveled in those circles. She had this great smile. Asking her to marry me was the best decision I have made by a long shot. She has an extraordinary way of making everybody feel good.”
As a young married man soon with two children — a boy and a girl — Bloom was looking to move up in the corporate world.
“I had motivation to support my young family,” Bloom says.
A friend alerted him to the job of vice president of international finance with Wilson Sporting Goods. Bloom’s avid interest in sports added to the appeal of the high profile position.
“In 1986 [Wilson Sporting Goods] had $40 million in revenue and six years later we had $240 million. It was a company owned by PepsiCo. We were under a lot of pressure to perform because we had a lot of debt. I was building systems in the company. The competition in the world of sporting goods was strong.”
Wilson was a hard-charging environment but a phone call in 1991 put Bloom on another corporate path.
“A headhunter told me about a job opportunity in Conway, Ark., at the time. It was to be a CFO of a public company. I knew very little about Arkansas other than John Daly won the PGA Tournament that year. I came down and talked to leadership at Acxiom, Charles Morgan and his team. We ended up taking the job and moving to a house in west Little Rock, where we live today.”
Bloom was in place at Acxiom during the time it crossed over, as he notes, to “a billion dollars in revenue.” Business was booming.
“What I really like to do is have an empty canvas to paint the financial support for the business,” Bloom says. “Wilson Sporting Goods didn’t have the systems in place and being able to give the company the data they needed to make decisions was what I enjoyed about my work. In Acxiom it was keeping pace with the acquisitions. I like being involved in the operations of the business more than simply just staying on top of various financial aspects.”
FROM THE GIFT SHOP
“I started volunteering at Heifer in 2009,” Jill Bloom recalls. “I love their mission and thought about the lives they were changing. I was volunteering in the gift shop when I heard they were looking for a CFO. I just heard them talking about it. I told [Bob] about it.”
Bloom didn’t throw his name into the mix until after the process had closed. Bloom’s resume and his living in Little Rock made Heifer consider his application.
“He’s always had a passion for giving,” Jill says. “The timing turned out to be perfect because he had what Heifer needed.”
The early part of Bloom’s time at Heifer was spent on streamlining the audit process for the nonprofit.
“The calling of ending hunger and poverty is massive,” Bloom says. “We had been doing great work for 46 countries and 900 projects across those countries. We needed to scale up and increase the impact of our work. We needed to diversify our revenue sources.”
A large percentage of the money coming into Heifer had been through the public as they used the catalog to buy “a cow or a flock of chicks” for a farm in some other part of the world.
“We moved to secure institutional funding and work with large foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. When you have a sophisticated foundation, you
have to have the systems in place to provide them with the information that they need. We have to meet the requirements they have.”
Over the years, Bloom has helped, as he says, Heifer “scale up and serve thousands of families where in the past we were dealing with hundreds.”
For Bloom, Heifer’s idea of “passing on the gift” is a view of the world where charity continues ever forward. He and his wife work with other organizations outside of Heifer helping causes closer to home.
Bloom’s down time is spent either “playing golf when I can or running.” He has two new grandkids and can Facetime with them but of course prefers to see them in person.
Jill Bloom says the work at Heifer means that her husband “won’t ever retire.”
“Heifer has been such an amazing and rewarding organization where we have the privilege of connecting the generosity of our donors and the needs of small scale farmers to help these farmers help themselves,” says Bloom.
Bloom doesn’t need a balance sheet to make that equation work out.
“My cost accounting teacher pulled me aside and said, ‘You’re very good at this. This could be your career.’ Everybody was looking for that kind of encouragement and that definitely resonated with me.”