Recent Articles from Katherine Gustafson
Power up
In October 2023, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Grid Deployment Office awarded Dominion Energy a grant of $33.7 million to help make the state’s electrical grid more efficient. The funds, provided through the department’s $3.5 billion Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships (GRIP) program, will support increasing battery storage capacity in rural communities and facilitating more [&hell[...]
2024 Virginia CFO Awards: Nonprofits: John Zabrowski, VHC Health
VHC Health Chief Financial Officer John Zabrowski zeroed in on accounting and finance early in life, double majoring in the subjects at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business and then doing two internships in public accounting after graduation. “I love economics, I love statistics,” he says. “I found that I was really attracted to the […]
2024 Virginia CFO Awards: Large Business: Sean Daily, CAES
Sean Daily, chief financial officer of Arlington County defense technology contractor CAES, didn’t set out to forge a career in defense. But an interest in corporate finance, sparked by an internship at Marriott International, combined with an opportunity to join Lockheed Martin after his graduation from Virginia Tech. Soon enough, “I developed an interest in […]
2024 Virginia CFO Awards: Small Business: Joel Flax, Cohen Investment Group
Joel Flax hadn’t planned on serving as a chief financial officer after retiring from a full-fledged career as an accountant and tax advisor. But it also wasn’t the first time he made an unexpected career shift. In college, he had wanted to be a sportswriter. But shortly after graduating from William & Mary with a […]
Slow and steady
The Lynchburg region has seen the slowest job growth of any metro area in Virginia over the past three years, according to economic analyses, and it typically has a higher unemployment rate than the state average. But there’s more to the story, some officials say. For instance, the Lynchburg region saw 23 inquiries from economic […]
Old Dominion, new data
As available land for data centers in Loudoun County — home to Data Center Alley, the world’s largest concentration of data centers — has become scarcer and more expensive, the industry has expanded into other Northern Virginia localities and beyond. In Virginia, Prince William County has become the other heat map for the industry — […]
Va.’s Largest Companies: Emergency landing
As the U.S. economy showed signs of unexpected strength and inflation slowed throughout 2023, most of Virginia’s largest publicly traded companies held their own, with some riding high. Reston-based General Dynamics saw its highest-ever quarterly revenue, while Performance Food Group, headquartered in Goochland County, made the Fortune 100 for the first time. Arlington County-based Fortune [&hel[...]
Business smarts
In Assistant Professor Michael Albert’s MBA data science class at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, students analyze historical usage data for a bike-sharing service to determine a bicycle maintenance schedule. In the past, they would tackle this simulation by writing code in the Python computer programming language — a pain point for […]
Them’s the brakes
Total compensation for S&P 500 CEOs nationwide last year marked its smallest year-over-year increase since 2015, with pay increasing 0.9% from 2021. Here in Virginia, CEOs faced even greater headwinds — their total pay increased just 0.3% from 2021 to 2022, down from a 4.9% increase between 2020 and 2021. The slowdown was a result […]