Tim Hoffmann’s affinity for competitive environments has led him to the top of his field.
Before he became the vice president of finance at Icelandic medical device company Embla Medical hf (Nasdaq: EMBLA), Hoffmann was a championship-winning volleyball player at the University of California, Los Angeles, a business school graduate at Cornell University and a senior manager in consulting at Deloitte.
“I’ve always wanted to challenge myself,” whether it be on the court, in the classroom or in the office, Hoffmann told the Business Journal.
His work at Embla, the newly established parent company of Össur—a provider of prosthetics and other mobility-related products for amputees and disabled persons—was recognized this month with the Rising Star Award at the Business Journal’s 17th annual CFO of the Year Awards at the Irvine Marriott.
Embla, which has an office in Irvine, has seen a growth in profitability since Hoffmann joined the company three years ago. The global mobility company was valued at $1.8 billion as of last week and does about $800 million in revenue annually.
SoCal Native
Hoffmann, who grew up in Huntington Beach, attended Santa Ana’s Mater Dei High School, where he developed a love for volleyball. His dedication to the sport earned him a volleyball scholarship at UCLA.
There, he balanced playing as the team’s libero with his economics major, accounting minor and financial planning and analysis internship at Sony Pictures Entertainment, which hired him as a full-time financial analyst after he graduated in 2008.
Deloitte Gigs
After about two years at Sony, Hoffmann landed a spot on Deloitte’s auditing arm.
He then transferred from auditing to consulting, a “highly competitive” department that recruits from the top 10 business schools, he said.
“I was basically treated as an external candidate,” he added.
His consulting group advised CFOs and other execs at Fortune 500 companies, including Nike and Johnson & Johnson.
Though he enjoyed the travel-heavy life of a consultant, Hoffmann left Deloitte shortly after the arrival of his firstborn child.
“With our growing family, my wife and I thought it would be best to find a local opportunity for me,” he said.
Boosting Profitability
The pivot prompted Hoffmann to join Embla, which was at the time known as Össur, in 2021.
Chief among his achievements at Embla is the restructuring of the incentive compensation plan for the company’s clinicians.
Through interviews with key players in Embla’s patient care business, “we determined that, in most cases, our clinicians believed that Össur products were better for patients,” he said.
Their old bonus program, however, inadvertently deterred the sale of Össur products to patients because it factored in the cost of goods sold by clinicians. Selling higher-priced products to patients negatively affected clinicians’ bonuses, leading them to opt for non-Össur products, which are cheaper for clinics to acquire than Össur devices.
Hoffmann updated the incentive compensation program, reducing the cost of goods’ impact on clinician bonuses and adding a guideline that promoted Össur product sales.
The result?
“Better patient experiences and a profitability increase to the tune of $3 million per year,” he said.
Hoffmann has since been thankful for the opportunity to improve Embla’s patient care business.
“A lot of trust has been placed in me to deliver on these issues,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to achieve any of these things without the team I have.”
