Donald Voska is a generalist.
He oversees the finance and purchasing departments of Santa Ana-based Goodwill Industries of Orange County as its vice president of finance and chief financial officer, doing everything from signing checks to overseeing the financing of some of the organization’s major projects.
The Business Journal honored him in the not-for-profit category at its seventh annual CFO of the Year Awards Jan. 28 at Hotel Irvine Jamboree Center (see related stories, pages 1, 4, 5 and 6).
“What I do is sometimes very complex. A lot of it’s routine,” Voska said. “I’m a working CFO. I’m not like a CFO of a Fortune 500 company that sits in an ivory tower and oversees things. I have to do both.”
Big Challenge
One of Voska’s greatest challenges is the breadth of the organization’s businesses, for which he provides financial guidance. The businesses include 22 stores in Orange County and the auction site shopgoodwill.org, which is used by other Goodwill branches and a service arm for local businesses called Goodwill Business Services.
There’s also the Goodwill Fitness Center in Santa Ana, for which Voska worked on the financing. It has about 350 members and costs about $500,000 annually to run.
The organization had revenue of more than $110 million last year, up about 7% from a year earlier.
“When you think about how horizontal we are, you can’t think of another company that has as many business lines as we do,” Voska said. “Everyone thinks Goodwill is just the stores because they donate and you get a tax donation, but they have no idea how we help people.”
Voska’s major accomplishments have come throughout his nearly 15 years there, and colleagues can’t say enough nice things about the finance chief.
“As an organization, we are truly fortunate to have Don in what I regard as a critical, strategic leadership role,” said Goodwill Industries President and Chief Executive Frank Talarico Jr. “This is especially true as we continue to realize our vision of doubling the number of people we serve. Personally, working with Don is a joy. He’s truly a trusted colleague, and he’s sneaky funny.”
ERP System
Voska is in the midst of helping Goodwill implement an enterprise resource planning system to track inventory and provide an interface between different departments. He said full implementation should be completed this year.
He helped the organization save some $250,000 in attorney and loan origination fees by paying off nearly $7 million in debt last summer as part of a debt consolidation plan that allowed Goodwill to fix the interest rate on its remaining debt rather than have it be subject to an adjustable rate that changed weekly.
He’s also credited with helping lead the organization during the recession, a financially challenging period for many nonprofits, though Goodwill continued to report net income each year.
“The whole idea is to fund [the organization] in a way that you can make it all balance out and turn a small profit,” Voska said. “It doesn’t mean a not-for-profit shouldn’t have a profit. You have to. You have to do well financially to do good for people.”
Even those outside the organization are quick to point out Voska’s dedication to Goodwill’s purpose.
Dana Joanou, a partner at Irvine accounting firm Kushner Smith Joanou & Gregson LLP, has been working with Voska for about 10 years and described him as dependable and a deep thinker.
“He has a real desire to do what he does well, to make sure the mission of Goodwill is carried out,” he said. “He’s an incredible family man. I don’t know how he balances it all, and he has a real concern for the organization and its people and the people on his team.”
Voska’s hands are in so many pots that he’s lucky if he’s able to accomplish just one thing on his to-do list each day. He said he usually reserves evenings in the office for time to catch up on changes to tax code law or even emails, sometimes staying as late as 10.
But what’s kept him at the nonprofit for so long, he said, is its simple mission to help those with disabilities or other barriers find work and keep it.
“It’s a hand up, not a handout,” Voska said. “We help people to help themselves to prepare themselves for the workforce and whatever kind of training is necessary. That’s what we do.”
