Blue Wolf Capital CFO wins pfm leadership award

On Wednesday, Blue Wolf Capital Partners' chief financial officer Joshua Cherry-Seto was unveiled as the sixth recipient of the pfm Leadership Award at the 2016 PEI CFOs and COOs Forum in New York.
 
Cherry-Seto, accepting the award in front of roughly 500 industry peers, used the opportunity to stress the need for more collaboration among middle market private equity firms in proactively engaging investors, regulators and legislators in building best practices around business development and risk management that benefit all industry participants and stakeholders.
 
The pfm Leadership Award is an annual award given in recognition of an individual able to advance any number of key issues and causes important to the private fund CFO and COO role. The award is wholly determined by pfm 's editorial staff. Past award recipients include ex-Adams Street CFO William Hupp and The Riverside Company COO Pamela Hendrickson.
 
Cherry-Seto was selected as this year's winner for a number of reasons, but his work in the middle-market space, often shadowed by the more visible large-cap end of the market, is what sealed his selection.
 
He is actively involved with multiple mid-market private equity groups and initiatives, including a handful established by the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG), a trade body which focuses on the middle market.
 
Cherry-Seto is on the Steering Committee of the ACG's “Private Equity Regulatory Taskforce,” which regularly meets with legislators, regulators and industry groups to advance issues important to the middle market. He is also co-chair with Béla Schwartz, CFO of The Riverside Company, of the taskforce's committee on fees and expenses, a topic regulators forced GPs to move higher up their priority lists following heightened scrutiny and recent enforcement action. Given his ongoing work on fee and expense disclosures, Cherry-Seto has also actively engaged as a middle market GP resource with LP initiatives, like the Institutional Limited Partners Association's ongoing development of a fee reporting template this past year following the inability of the California Public Employees' Retirement System to clearly report private equity fees, expenses and other compensation last year sparking substantial media scrutiny into LPs' fee recording/accounting practices. 
 
Cherry-Seto also serves as a board member for ACG NY, focused on programming which fosters collaboration and engagement of middle market private equity CFOs.  He is co-chair with Blinn Cirella, CFO of Saw Mill Capital, of the ACG private equity CFO's Roundtable, a sister group to the ACG private equity Roundtable, which they formed last year. The Roundtable has quarterly dinner programs and quarterly national breakfast calls, providing opportunities to discuss issues facing middle market private equity CFOs.
 
On responsible investing and reporting, another emerging topic CFOs are increasingly asked about during LP due diligence, Cherry-Seto has engaged mid-market CFOs to back the UN-supported Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) for which his firm has been an active signatory and he has served as a speaker. He is also a regular speaker at PEI events, including pfm 's own tax forum held last year, where he engaged on discussions around tax issues related to the move towards flow-through investing and IRS pronouncements around management fee waivers.