Director of Commercial Finance

Who WE Are

We are a leader in the specialty cheese industry serving our consumers by crafting and importing the best cheeses in the world while caring for our employees and our communities.

Who YOU Are

You strive for excellence in your area of expertise and are proud to work at a company producing premium products. You are passionate about continuous improvement, enjoy bringing creativity to your work, and are excited to blaze new trails to grow and improve our business. You foster a positive and rewarding workplace culture by valuing flexibility, work-life balance, and team development while inspiring team members to achieve their full potential.

If this sounds like you, we want you to consider joining Emmi Roth!

Job Summary

Reporting directly to the VP Finance, the Director Commercial Finance is responsible for shaping and executing the Commercial Finance strategy, delivering insights that drive profitability, transparency, and growth across branded, non-branded, own-manufactured, imported, and traded goods. Working with the sales team this individual will Develop and refine robust KPIs, reporting tools, and dashboards to provide visibility into business performance, enabling proactive decision-making.

Essential duties and Responsibilities

• Improve transparency in area of sales (gross/net), trade spend (fixed, variable) and profitability by customers, channels and products.
• Design and implement a comprehensive trade spend framework, including clear principles, approval processes.
• Strengthen financial acumen across the organization by coaching Sales and Marketing teams in commercial finance principles, enabling smarter financial decision-making.
• Challenge trade spend effectiveness, ensuring every dollar spent delivers a measurable return on investment and aligns with overall business objectives.
• Enhance financial visibility into trade spend dynamics, differentiating between fixed and variable costs while ensuring compliance with corporate accounting standards.
• Lead the financial governance of customer deductions, establishing a rigorous approval and accruals process to minimize risks and ensure transparency.
• Establish strategic pricing policies, ensuring alignment between customer and product margins, price increase triggers, and competitive positioning.
• Leverage market insights to drive optimized pricing strategies, ensuring that our product mix, promotional spend, and strategic objectives are in sync.
• Monitor competitor pricing trends and provide recommendations to maintain market competitiveness and profitability.
• Lead financial evaluation of new product launches, channel expansion, and strategic initiatives, ensuring sustainable revenue growth and margin enhancement.
• Challenge performance levels to ensure spend effectiveness, return on investment and recognize improvement opportunities.
• Play an important role in the integrated planning process (IBP), including sales forecasting, cost assumptions, and trade spend integration.
• Collaborate closely with Brand and Sales Leadership to shape marketing plans, set brand targets, and allocate budgets, ensuring commercial strategies are financially sound.
• Utilize Market Data to provide comparative performance metrics and understanding.
• Act as a strategic advisor to senior leadership, challenging existing assumptions and driving continuous improvement in commercial decision-making.
• Play a central role in the Integrated Business Planning (IBP) process, ensuring seamless integration of sales forecasting, cost assumptions, and trade spend into financial planning.

Qualifications/Minimum Requirements

• Bachelor's degree, CMA or equivalent certification a plus.
• 10 years of experience in Commercial Finance (Sales Controlling) with a proven track record in a branded business, including 3 years in a managerial role.
• Candidates must possess a strong toolkit (best practice in similar industries) of how to improve a product portfolio (portfolio shift) and profitability of a business. They must know how to read, interpret and work with market data and have a good understanding of financial statements, business impact analysis and cost management.
• Experience with ERP systems (ideally JDE), Excel, and financial modeling tools.
• Strong analytical, communication, and leadership skills. Eager to learn and continuously further develop.
• Ability to collaborate across functions and challenge business performance effectively.
• Can-do attitude, willingness to drive change.
• Experience using various intranet and web-based technologies to effectively communicate and coordinate with remote staff is preferred (Microsoft Teams).

The Best Cheese Moments are EMMI ROTH Moments!

Equal Opportunity Employer Minorities/Women/Veterans/Disabled