At the age of 14, Sandra Beaver joined a student business club where she began preparing business reports. She also spent a summer as an intern at Staples Inc. where her mother worked in investor relations.
“I’d watch videos on insider trading as a teenager!” she told the Business Journal. “Now I know what not to say to who about stocks.
“It was a great education. At the time, I underappreciated how good it was.”
Beaver for the past two years has been the chief financial officer at Newport Beach-based Evolus Inc., a seller of Jeuveau, an aesthetics product that competes with Allergan’s Botox.
She oversaw a 36% sales growth to $202 million in 2023; growth this year may be as much as 31%, or $265 million. The company has told Wall Street that it intends to almost triple sales to $700 million by 2028.
During her tenure, the employee count has grown from 160 to almost 300.
To top it off, Beaver held 19 meetings in one day with investors in March in a successful effort to raise $50 million.
“We were getting a lot of inbound interest,” she said. “We priced it at the market—there was no discount on the share price. It was three times oversubscribed.”
Since she joined Evolus, shares have risen about 40% to $12.77 and an $800 million market cap.
For all these reasons, Beaver was honored by the Business Journal at the 17th annual CFO of the Year Awards, in the public company category, on May 9 at the Irvine Marriott before about 600 attendees.
“Sandra has played a pivotal role in continuing the fast-paced growth of our business, as well as laid the financial pathway to secure a licensing agreement to expand our product portfolio of aesthetic consumer brands,” Evolus Chief Executive David Moatazedi said in a statement about the award.
“Sandra’s strong strategic leadership and vision has been instrumental in the success of our company. Her key insights, exceptional performance and many contributions to our company have guided us through complex business scenarios with seamless precision.”
A Child’s Plight
Beaver, who was born in Palo Alto and was raised in Chelmsford, Mass., said she learned the value of an education by watching her parents put themselves through night school to earn college degrees.
Beaver earned her bachelor’s degree in finance and economics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and completed ongoing educational programs at University of California, Los Angeles and the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. In 2002, she began working for International Game Technology PLC.
About 10 years ago, she noticed her daughter, Kiley, who was then 2 years old, wasn’t acting well.
“Something wasn’t right, and you couldn’t put your finger on it,” she recalled. “I thought,
‘No child should be this unhappy.’”
Kiley was diagnosed with leukemia, which Beaver said could be difficult to catch because the symptoms are subtle. When Kiley went to chemotherapy every week for more than two years, employees at IGT treated her well, bringing dinner to the family every night during the sessions.
“The amount of compassion was overwhelming,” Beaver said.
A year into the therapy, Beaver received an offer for her dream of becoming a CFO at IGT’s North America Gaming and Interactive business unit.
“Becoming a CFO was a job that I always wanted. I didn’t know if I could do this (because of Kiley’s ongoing chemotherapy),” Beaver recalled. “My family all said, ‘We’re going to lean in.’ Our whole family moved to Las Vegas.
“It was such a tremendous gift to have that support and encouragement of my family.”
Kiley, now 13, has been cancer-free for nine years.
Beaver arrived in Orange County in 2019 to work as the senior vice president of finance at the Costa Mesa office of Experian, where she was responsible for consolidated financial planning and analysis for half of the company’s North America B2B business units with revenue more than $1 billion.
Evolus
In 2022, Evolus hired her.
“With a company of this size, you have to fundamentally believe that it could grow and be great,” Beaver said. “Just the caliber and quality of the talent was unique. It has the potential to be much bigger.”
Evolus is best known for supplying neurotoxins that eliminate wrinkles. Unlike Allergan, Evolus targets younger millennials.
Last year, Beaver led the company’s licensing agreements that expanded its product portfolio with the addition of late-stage dermal fillers in the U.S. and European markets.
Once fully launched, the fillers, which are being marketed as Evolysse, will cover mid-face, nasolabial folds, lips and eyes.
When she joined, the Evolus’ total addressable market (TAM) was $2.4 billion, and the fillers have expanded the TAM to $6 billion.
The company can piggyback on its existing relationships where it sells Jeuveau to about 13,000 aesthetic practices in the U.S., Beaver said.
“Fillers are incredibly synergistic” with Jeuveau, she said. “We certainly will scale.”
