Strategic Finance Executive | Team Builder | Change Agent
CAREER PATH
Over the past two decades, Larry has developed an impressive leadership profile founded on significant fundraising success and organizational expansion, a commitment to data-driven decision-making and the benefits of technology, and an acute understanding of financial matters. Larry is now in the second phase of his career, working as a fractional CFO for several nonprofit and for-profit companies across a variety of industries.
- He has extensive experience managing the affairs of complex national and international organizations in the arts and culture, nonprofit, and higher education sectors.
- He is a strategic thinker with the keen ability to rally groups of diverse stakeholders around institutional goals and priorities.
- He is equally as devoted to identifying and correcting organizational inefficiencies as he is to discovering and capitalizing on new sources of revenue.
Larry is currently serving as Interim CFO at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, where he was recruited to spearhead a critical financial turnaround for the storied liberal arts college. The institution had suffered two consecutive years of $20 million operating deficits, threatening its long-term viability.
Collaborating closely with the interim president, Larry is addressing the college's structural financial challenges while implementing revenue enhancement strategies to ensure its sustainability. His efforts have already led to substantial improvements, including streamlining financial aid processes, developing a multiyear financial forecast, and optimizing cash flow. Larry has also unlocked balance sheet assets to enhance liquidity, cultivated relationships with financial institutions and strategic partners, overseen the sale of key assets, and renegotiated contracts to reduce annual recurring costs. His leadership is positioning the college for financial stability.
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For eight years, Larry was the Senior Vice President of Administration & Treasurer at the Curtis Institute of Music, a specialized institution of higher education and one of only a handful of colleges across the country where all students attend tuition-free. Larry's unique role at Curtis effectively combined the functions of a COO, CFO, and chief of staff.
At Curtis, Larry ensured the financial health and regularly evaluated the business model of the college. He worked very closely with the board of trustees, navigating a multifaceted governance structure with over a dozen committees and a separately incorporated foundation entity. In addition to overseeing the work of the finance, general administration, human resources, facilities and information technology offices, he coordinated all cross-departmental projects and initiatives, and he developed and nurtures important relationships with partner institutions.
Most critically, because there is no regularly recurring revenue stream from tuition, as would be the case at most colleges and universities, Curtis is unusually reliant on contributed revenue. To that end, Larry worked hand-in-hand with the development team on major gift fundraising efforts (endowment, capital and special project campaigns), from prospect identification and cultivation, all the way to donor solicitation and stewardship, ultimately helping to secure between $15 and $25 million in support each year.
Larry has helped develop proposals that directly led to over $50 million in special funding and financing for the modernization of the school's original building, renovations to the campus's main performance hall and recording studio, the school's rare instrument collection endowment, the purchase of Curtis's first Hamburg Steinway piano, the elimination of the school's private loan program and other forms of student debt, and the creation of an alumni ensemble-in-residence program. Larry spearheaded new partnerships with the Sphinx Organization to launch a tuition-free summer training academy for young musicians of color; with WHYY to expand public access to student performances over-the-air and online; with Opera Philadelphia to amplify the school's presence in the opera company's popular annual fall festival; and with Bauer & Dean to publish a biography of Curtis's founder, Mary Louise Curtis Bok. Larry also launched Curtis's first in-house IT department in 2017, a decision that proved prescient when all operations were recently moved online due to the public health crisis.
Larry oversaw Curtis’s COVID-19 preparedness and response teams, successfully leading the school through the most difficult parts of the crisis, ensuring safe and reliable distance-learning and work-from-home protocols, securing emergency government funding for student technology needs, and developing plans for Curtis's reopening.
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Prior to this role at Curtis, he served as the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Financial Officer at DataArts (formerly the Cultural Data Project) from 2014-2016. There, he forged data collection partnerships with the League of American Orchestras, Dance USA, and Chorus America, and developed a survey instrument that has now become the gold standard for demographic data collection throughout the nonprofit sector. Other notable achievements at DataArts include being a key member of the team that raised over $10 million in startup funding from local and national partners, and initiating plans for what would result in an eventual merger with SMU. DataArts is now thriving in Dallas, and Larry remains on the organization's advisory board.Before that position, Larry was the Director of Finance and Operations at OPERA America for more than six years. Larry supervised all day-to-day aspects of the $14.5 million National Opera Center capital campaign, including financial modeling, fundraising, lease negotiation, facilities logistics and contract negotiations with architects, engineers, vendors and consultants. The successful effort led to a host of new, diversified revenue streams and the creation of several new full and part-time jobs.
Larry came to OPERA America from the New York Youth Symphony where he was operations manager and staff accountant for three years. A strong negotiator, Larry both lowered the Symphony's performance venue costs and increased advertising revenues for its program books.***
Displaying high degrees of empathy, passion and drive, Larry has proven able to transform legacy organizations from the inside by building strong relationships with colleagues and being a supportive advisor and confidant to an organization's chief executive. Larry has been a guest speaker and a panelist at major industry conferences across the country. He is a sought-after advisor, serving on boards and committees of leading national non-profit arts institutions.
ADDITIONAL BACKGROUND
Larry earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in Music at Haverford College, graduating with high honors. He received a Master of Arts in Historical Musicology from the City College of New York, while serving as a Lecturer of Music History at Hunter College and authoring several research papers on opera and musical theater that were published in academic journals in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K. He also holds an MBA from the revolutionary Quantic School of Business and Technology.
Devoted to personal ongoing professional development, in 2016, he became a certified Crestcom Bullet Proof Manager, and in 2017, Larry earned a certificate in executive leadership from the highly selective NELI program at Bryn Mawr College's Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research.
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Larry is an avid performer and teacher of four-part harmony singing. He is the founding director of the award-winning Voices of Gotham chorus, having served in the position from the ensemble’s inception in 2008 until 2014, when he moved to Philadelphia to pursue career opportunities and grow his family. He returned in July 2018 in a new role as Artistic Director, where he had been tasked with building and expanding the musical leadership from within the chorus's talented ranks. After successfully completing that mission, he stepped down in 2022 to oversee administrative aspects of the chorus. He now serves as the ensemble's Chief Executive Officer and Board Chair.
He currently sings tenor with 'Round Midnight, the 2006 New York Harmony Sweepstakes Champions, 2010 Mid-Atlantic District Champions, 2023 National Harmony Sweepstakes Audience Favorite, and three-time Barbershop Harmony Society international finalist quartet. He previously sang tenor with the 2007 International Varsity Quartet Champion, Road Trip. In addition to founding Voices of Gotham, he was instrumental in launching three other vocal ensembles - the SSAA Sirens of Gotham chorus in 2011, the TTBB Rittenhouse Sound chorus in 2014, and most recently, the SATB Gotham Chorus in 2020.
He lives in Philadelphia with his wife Coren, an architect, their two children Baylee and Salem, and their dog, Mare.