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E-mail: matzken@uwgb.edu

 


Jeff Cheney '79,
Business Administration and Accounting
Hometown: Laona
Chief Financial Office, Kohler Co.
Family: Wife Rhonda, children Lisa (25),
Matthew (20), Sarah (13)

Cheney a fixture with global giant Kohler
UW-Green Bay graduate Jeff Cheney helps shape business decisions for one of the world’s great corporations.
      Chief financial officer for Kohler Co., his reporting lines encompass financial vice presidents, controllers and business/accounting staffers, some 540 in all, companywide. He tracks and pursues profitability for divisions as diverse as Kohler’s signature kitchen-and-bath-product lines, engine and generator manufacturing, and the rising resort and recreation business. It’s on his authority, technically, that paychecks are cut for 31,000 associates.
      He’s a frequent flier, with dozens of trips to China — as part of Kohler’s exhaustive, decade-long strategic initiative to gain a market toehold there — and Scotland, where he helped his company acquire the landmark St. Andrew’s Old Course Hotel along the fabled 17th “Road Hole.”
      All very impressive for a small-town northern Wisconsin guy who remembers himself as blissfully “naïve” in the days before college graduation in spring 1979.
      “I never sent out a resume or applied anywhere,” he recalls. “I was thinking the companies would come after me. Which is, I guess, exactly what happened, but I was very fortunate things went the way they did.”
      The way things went is that someone at Kohler with decision-making influence had Green Bay ties. When a sudden resignation opened a spot in accounting, the call went up to UW-Green Bay for names of good candidates. Cheney’s was one of them. Offered the job after he interviewed a few days later,     he agreed to “give it a try for a while.”
      That was 28 years and numerous promotions ago. “I never left,” he says, “mainly because it has been so much fun.”
      He describes the two Kohlers — the company and its namesake village, a few miles outside Sheboygan — as the best of both worlds. His corporate office overlooks vacationers strolling the immaculate grounds of the American Club, the company’s five-star destination resort.
      “That’s nice. People unfamiliar with us can’t believe we have this world-renowned company, with $5 billion in annual sales, all in this small town,” Cheney says. “To have the big-city challenges, the global connections, and yet live in a small town, that’s special.”
      Also unique is the ownership structure. Founded in 1873, Kohler Co. is one of America’s oldest and largest family-owned companies.
      That differentiates the Kohler CFO from those at most other large corporations. Publicly traded companies have their advantages, but the low-key Cheney is a firm believer productivity is enhanced by not having to worry about outside analysts, stock prices and financial media outlets. He likes the fact Inside UW-Green Bay is about as close as he’ll get to having his name in the news.
      “I get to work day to day on real business problems, value-added activities, and I appreciate that,” he says. “With stability of ownership comes effectiveness. The rules don’t keep changing.”
      Cheney reports to the man he and others call “Herb” — Herbert V. Kohler, Jr., chairman, CEO and president, who since 1972 has directed the expansion from a highly successful plumbing products foundry to a multi-faceted international leader in various “gracious living” categories.
      Perhaps because Herb Kohler is the family’s third generation, a long-term mindset is a given. Says Cheney, “He doesn’t believe the company is his. He treats it more as an entity in and of itself.”
One thing Cheney thinks current students should know is that, if done right, accounting is anything but dry and dusty.
      “Outside of perhaps your first couple of jobs, your role is not to organize the numbers or read the numbers. It’s to know what the numbers mean. It’s to translate them into plans for the business, making them real. It’s very much about working with people.”
Wisconsin proud:
“We’re very, very proud of being a big Wisconsin employer,” Cheney says. With manufacturing plants, golf courses, retail and hospitality venues, Kohler employs more than 10,000 people in Sheboygan County alone. Most come from small towns within a 30-mile radius. “They provide a lot of stability, they are committed, they just do so much for the company.”
Kohler’s emergence in golf:
A solid player with a single-digit handicap, Cheney says his favorite course is Kohler’s Whistling Straits, home to the 2004 PGA championship and this year’s U.S. Senior Open. For a very short time, he held the course record. “I was fortunate to play an early round there. The foursome was Herb Kohler and myself, and Pete Dye (the course designer) and his wife, Alice, and I had a good day and shot a 74. It didn’t last too long, but that was a fun claim to fame for a while.” Kohler’s rise to golf-industry prominence provides another perk: Cheney sometimes subs for his boss at charity and corporate events. He made the cut in last year’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am. (He is pictured at right at Pebble Beach with PGA pro Ted Purdy and Cheney's boss, Herbert V. Kohler, Jr.)
Small-town upbringing:
“It is absolutely an advantage,” Cheney says. “You’re encouraged to stick to your values — honesty, forthrightness, hard work, commitment, toughness, all those things.” Jeff’s mom and dad, Gordie and the late Joe Cheney, had the Chevy dealership in Wabeno, about 90 miles north of Green Bay. Later, they ran the supper club on the west end of Laona. Jeff was a go-fer and did odd jobs as a kid, later tending bar through his college years. He saved enough to attend nearby Nicolet Community College before transferring to UW-Green Bay, where he hooked on with another supper club, Wally’s Spot on East Main Street. “I grew up being around business, knowing what it was about.”
Karl Zehms and ‘real life’:
“UW-Green Bay had an emerging reputation. I enjoyed it there. For a kid from northern Wisconsin, it felt like home. I’ll always remember Karl Zehms, a great teacher, and tough. On the very first day, I sat in the front row of one of his accounting classes, and I thought I heard him say to himself, under his breath, ‘There are too many kids here.” There were about 40, just packed in. Well, here I was expecting a light first day, and he assigns us reading. I don’t think any of us expected a quiz the next day, but there was. And the day after that and, probably, the day after that. With all the F’s, well, we got down to a manageable size in fairly short order. And the class never got any easier. I shared that story with my own kids in college, when they complained about a class being too hard, demanding, unfair. I tell them, ‘Real life isn’t always fair. Complaining doesn’t help you complete the assignment. And you might just learn something.’”

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