By Michael Blanding
FEATURES
Stacy Mills, BSBA ’87, is standing at the end of a long, white conference table on the 32nd floor of a Manhattan high-rise. A dozen or so Suffolk accounting students look on as she lays out their assignment: Marsh McLennan, a Fortune 200 corporation and the world’s leading professional services firm in the areas of risk, strategy, and people, is looking to acquire a new company, and the students must examine its financials and decide whether to make the purchase. The case is based on an actual decision that Marsh McLennan had to make, representing the kind of high-stakes choices corporate accountants face.
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Photography by Adam Hunger
| Fall 2022
Making more room at the top
"When this first came in, we had two days to figure out a preliminary answer. You have an hour and a half,” challenges Mills, who is the global controller and chief accounting officer for Marsh McLennan, overseeing all the company’s daily accounting operations and a staff of 1,700 employees worldwide. She is also a Suffolk University trustee and strong supporter of its accounting program.
Mills has reddish blond hair and glasses, and is wearing a blue blouse today in honor of the Suffolk students, who are visiting as part of a weeklong tour of companies arranged by accounting professors Tracey Riley and Melissa Renschler. “I thought it would be fun for you to see a real-world example of what we do, and in the end, we’ll tell you what we did,” Mills says with a slight Boston accent. As the students look around nervously, she offers them a reassuring smile. “You have the tools to do this."
For many of the students on the cusp of the “real world” themselves, being here is a heady experience. The plate-glass windows look out on a forest of skyscrapers, including the towering MetLife Building and the chrome spire of the Chrysler Building. Many are first-generation college students; some have never been to New York City before. They buzz with nervous energy as they break out into four groups in smaller conference rooms, accompanied by their “coaches,” other senior accounting staff whom Mills has enlisted for the exercise.
Over the next 90 minutes, the students wrangle over contingent compensation, multiyear commissions, and intangible assets to arrive at a total purchase price for the firm, and decide whether it’s worth the money. When the time comes to present their conclusions to Mills, they seem notably more confident. “It was difficult—but I had the skills to get through it,” says Michael Power, BSBA ’22.
One by one, the groups stand to talk through their reasoning—and despite small discrepancies, all arrive within the same ballpark on purchase price, between $174 million and $184 million. Two groups say they’d make the purchase, arguing it would generate revenue and create synergies with Marsh McLennan’s current businesses. One says they need more information, and the last, Power’s group, says they would not acquire the company, citing issues with its balance sheet and potential problems if employees exercise stock options.
At the moment of truth, Mills and her colleagues reveal they did not acquire the firm. “But I liked your conviction,” emphasizes Mills, adding she is impressed with the students’ reasoning. “I know we didn’t give you a lot of time, and you walked through the deal with the information you had. So excellent job, everyone.”
If the smiles around the table are any indication, the students are already feeling more like they belong in the room—which is the whole point. Mills herself knows what it’s like to come from a humble background; an electrician’s daughter and first-generation college student, she underwent her own struggles in rising to her now lofty perch, and she and the Suffolk professors wanted to show the students they could as well.
“We gave the students an imposter syndrome assessment, and they were off the chart,” says Riley, who is also the Business School’s associate dean of online programs. “Stacy’s story speaks to them, because it’s ‘I was you, and look where I got—and not because I was lucky, but I just worked hard and took every opportunity that came my way.’ To know she did that is inspiring to them.”
During their visit to Marsh McLennan’s New York headquarters, students made case study presentations to firm leaders. They also learned about a tragic chapter in the company’s history when they visited the 9/11 Memorial Museum (above): The firm lost more than 350 employees during the September 11 attacks.
‘The real world looks like me’
The weeklong trip to New York came out of a schedule change that Suffolk’s accounting department implemented this year.
A key part of an accounting student’s college experience is landing a summer internship at a major firm, yet competition with students from larger Boston-area schools can be fierce. Riley restructured the spring term so that students could take classes remotely while doing internships from January to April at top firms in Boston, including offices of the Big Four—Deloitte, Ernst & Young, PwC, and KPMG. That change, however, left them shy of a few credits to graduate, however, so the department created the New York trip to fill in those last credits while introducing students to accounting professionals operating at the highest levels.
In addition to organizing the day at Marsh McLennan, Mills provided funding for the students who would not otherwise have been able to afford the trip. It’s part of her own commitment to mentoring the next generation of Suffolk accounting students. “My intent was to make it easier for the next Stacys,” says Mills, who became a Suffolk trustee in 2019. “I remember what it was like to have multiple jobs and a scholarship and student loans, trying to figure out how I was going to get through the next semester."
Mills grew up in Billerica and commuted to Suffolk every day by bus, or drove into Wellington Station to take the T. During her junior year, her father did electrical work on a Suffolk building for a few months. “After my morning classes, I would go to the Capitol Coffee Shop and bring them all coffee,” Mills remembers. In the afternoons, she worked for a startup company on Long Wharf, doing all the books by hand. Many of her classmates, she recalls, were also juggling both schoolwork and after-school jobs. “There was this underlying buzz,” she says. “We were all able to multitask, and we had this drive to succeed.”
After graduating in 1987, she thought her future was set when she got a job as a public accountant at a Big Four firm. After she met her husband-to-be there, however, she was forced to leave, since company policy at the time didn’t allow employee relationships. She landed at another local accounting firm, but after she had her son, she realized she couldn’t juggle motherhood and the grueling demands of the company, which required her to fly back and forth to Philadelphia for a client several times a week. “It was the first time I had to admit, ‘I can’t do this,’” she says. “The cost was too much.”
Abandoning thoughts of the CPA partner track, she took a new job at a large Boston-based bank doing financial reporting and corporate accounting. Not only did she find a better work-life balance but she also enjoyed the corporate environment. “I like when people say, ‘You can’t do that, Stacy,’ and I say, ‘Oh yeah? Watch me.’” At the time, the accounting world was dominated by men, and she often felt she had to work twice as hard to prove herself. “I can’t tell you how many times I was in a room where I was the only woman—and there was no diversity either,” she says.
A few years later in 1999, a recruiter called her about a new position as controller at Putnam Investments under a female CFO, and she jumped at the chance to work for a woman in a male-dominated field. Even so, she never imagined herself as rising to those heights herself.
It was the CFO’s successor who encouraged her to think seriously about a career in the C-suite. “He was pivotal, the first one who kind of kicked me in the butt and said, ‘You know, you could really make it up the chain.’” At the time Putnam was owned by Marsh McLennan, which sold the company in 2007. The following year, she was invited to New York to become controller for the brokerage division.It was an agonizing decision—the brokerage division at Marsh McLennan alone took in $5 billion, five times Putnam’s entire annual revenue. Moreover, she was conflicted about commuting to New York while her son was still in high school. She turned to her father for advice, who reminded her that her son would soon be graduating and moving on: “He has his own car, his own life. What’s the worst that could happen?” After thinking a moment, Mills told him, “I could fail.” Her father didn’t miss a beat. “So, you pack up and come home.”
That wisdom convinced her to take the chance. Although she was “terrified” riding the Acela down that first day, she promised herself to give it at least a year before admitting defeat. Far from failing, she worked her way up over the next 14 years to deputy global controller, and then global controller and chief accounting officer by 2018. She jokingly told her father she was sitting in the “big girl chair” when she took him up to her office on the 44th floor. “I want to sit in the big girl chair,” he told her, settling into her office chair and looking out over the Manhattan skyline. “You are sitting up here with all these guys telling them what to do,” he marveled. It wasn’t quite like that, Mills insisted, but she basked in the moment. “You could see how proud he was.”
Mills attributes her success in part to her attention to detail, which is crucial for any publicly traded company. “I have this personality trait like I can’t do anything if I don’t do it really, really well,” she says with a smile. “Sometimes the people around me say that’s an annoying trait.” On the other hand, attention to her employees is just as crucial. “I have 1,700 people, and I wake up every day thinking about all of them,” she says, “making sure we are communicating and that they get everything they need.” On her trips to Marsh McLennan’s branches around the world, she shakes the hand of every person who works for her. “If you are going to lead people, I feel like they should at least know you.”
It’s that same care for people that has inspired her to give back to Suffolk. While she had long donated to her alma mater, she “had an epiphany” a few years back, wanting to make a more direct impact by consolidating her gifts. She dedicated half of her donations to a scholarship fund specifically for people like herself—accounting majors with financial needs. After the first year, she met the three women who received the award. “One of them said to me, ‘I was going to have to drop out [otherwise],’” Mills says. “She starts to cry. I start to cry.”
She gave the rest to the Department of Accounting to set up a fund to sponsor students for trips such as the one the students are on today. On November 1, in recognition of Mills’s leadership philanthropy, the University will rename the Blue Sky Lounge in Sargent Hall in her honor.
After lunch, a diverse panel of Mills’ associates—some heads of their own accounting divisions—tell their own stories about how they rose in the firm. The panel includes several women of color, and people from economically disadvantaged backgrounds. “I wanted the students to see there are a lot of people at Marsh McLennan who are just like me,” Mills explains.
At the close of the day, Mills brought the group to the 9/11 Memorial Museum to share one last, crucial piece of Marsh McLennan history. The company, which once occupied several of the top floors of World Trade Center’s North Tower, lost more than 350 employees and consultants in the September 11 attacks. Even as Marsh McLennan reeled from the loss, “the company just mobilized—everybody was trying to help,” says Mills, who was still working in the Boston office at the time. “It showed what kind of organization we are. Even today, we care about our people.”
The day with Mills left Emily Nguyen, BSBA ’22, moved and inspired. Her parents work at a ceramics company in Worcester, and she and her sister are the first in their family to go to college. “The most impactful part for me was hearing everyone’s stories and how they got to where they are now,” she says. “Sometimes it’s not a straight shot—you have to move horizontally as you are moving up the ladder.”
Miguel Cruz, BSBA ’22, called the experience “life-changing.” His family emigrated from El Salvador and settled in East Boston, where his mother worked as a cleaner and father as a landscaper. After a kindergarten teacher told him he “didn’t have a brain” because he couldn’t add or subtract, Cruz went home and defiantly wrote down all the numbers from 1 to 200 and started adding and subtracting them, launching a lifelong love affair with math.
Still, he never thought he’d even go to college until a teacher saw potential and recommended him for a program where he could take a course at Suffolk for credit while still in high school. He attended Suffolk on scholarship and did well in accounting, but during his internship senior year, he felt doubts about whether he belonged in an environment where everyone seemed to come from more privileged, advantaged backgrounds. Even on the New York trip, he was questioning his career path until he heard the stories from Mills and her colleagues. “I started getting excited about being an accountant again,” he says. “It made me see, maybe there are people like me, I’ve just got to go look and find the right fit.”
That’s exactly what Mills was hoping the students would take away from the day she constructed to mentor them at Marsh McLennan. “I wanted them to sit there and say to themselves, ‘Maybe my parents didn’t go to college, maybe English wasn’t my first language, but I don’t feel inferior,’” she says. “They could see that they learned all of these accounting rules in school, and now when they get into the real world, they can apply them all. I was hoping they could take all of that and say, ‘Here’s what the real world looks like, and it looks like me.’”
“I like when people say, ‘You can’t do that, Stacy,’ and I say, ‘Oh yeah? Watch me.’”
—Stacy Mills
