People thought Dianna MacDonald was crazy to leave her job of nine years in the middle of a pandemic to lead financial services at a company she had never heard of.
MacDonald was announced Friday as the new chief financial officer of Powerhouse, a national construction, facilities maintenance and rollout services provider based in Crowley. She will lead the company’s financial operations, including deploying advanced forecasting — a crucial effort during a pandemic that continues to change the economic landscape.
She has 25 years of experience in the male-dominated private equity industry, which she said has prepared her for the construction industry.
“If construction is male-loaded, private equity is double male-loaded,” she said.
Women account for only 10 percent of the construction workforce across the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
If the construction workforce across the country, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Before Powerhouse, MacDonald served as CFO of Authentix, an authentication information technology company. She has a bachelor’s degree in business administration with a concentration in accounting from Oregon State University and began her career at accounting firm KPMG.
What struck MacDonald most when she was learning more about the position was the number of women who were in high-profile positions at Powerhouse.
“They’ve always been looking for — not the gender, not so they could claim diversification,” she said. “They were looking for the best person in the business to do the job and it just so happened that many of those were women. And so that was really where I started looking at it seriously.”
She joins five other women in senior vice president or vice president roles in the company.
Forecasting is crucial to Powerhouse in this moment when economic situations are shifting so rapidly, MacDonald said. Many of Powerhouse’s clients didn’t cancel contracts, but pushed them at the beginning of the pandemic as they adjusted.
Click here to read the full article from Dallas Business Journal, by Taylor Tompkins.
