In August 2023, Krause Group finalized its sale of Kum & Go and Solar Transport to Maverik, making the Utah-based group the 12th-largest convenience store chain in the U.S. 

One of the key figures getting that transaction across the finish line was Erin Kuhl, the 2024 Deloitte Chief Financial Officer of the Year. The award honors an often unsung individual who demonstrates outstanding performance in his, her or their role as corporate financial steward. 

Kuhl first joined Kum & Go in April 2019 as CFO before taking on the same position with Krause Group in June 2021. In April 2023, she added chief of staff to her title, a position that is 90% duties as assigned, she said. 

In addition to playing a key role in the transaction, Kuhl said one of the achievements that gives her the most pride is nurturing and developing great teams. 

“One of the things I think is really important is getting to know people, not just getting to know them as people but what their skills are and what they’re good at and putting them in situations and assigning them work, roles and responsibilities that match up with what they’re good at,” Kuhl said. “Two people can be great at accounting or financial modeling, but their personalities and the way that they work and what motivates them can make one of them better for one situation over another. So I think it’s kind of this right person, right seat, and putting everyone in a position where their impact can be maximized is how I build that team aspect of it. 

“I’m a firm believer that when people are in those situations, when they’re put in situations so they can make a bigger impact, that drives the success of the team as a whole and creates a great chemistry among a group of people.”

Kuhl, who is originally from Las Vegas, moved to Des Moines in 2010 after spending the previous six years at PwC Chicago. She worked as the manager of accounting policy and transaction support for Aviva for three years before becoming director of financial reporting and later vice president and controller at Athene, which bought Aviva in 2013.  

During her 13 years working in Des Moines, Kuhl has been invested in the community, currently as a board member of the finance and executive committees for Oakridge Neighborhood; as a board member of the executive committee for MercyOne Des Moines Foundation; and in various positions with United Way of Central Iowa.

Past community engagement includes roles with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Iowa, the Greater Des Moines Leadership Institute, Winefest Des Moines and DSM Financial Executive Women. Kuhl was also recognized in the Business Record Forty Under 40 class of 2020. 

“Erin is synonymous with action,” Shannon Cofield, president of the MercyOne Des Moines Foundation Board, said in a letter recommending Kuhl for the award. “No matter the issue at hand, she provides sound advice and actionable solutions. Each encounter with her is enlightening and joyful. She is not only a tremendous CFO with years of financial experience; she is truly an inspiring and dedicated professional who is very deserving of this honor.” 

The Business Record recently sat down with Kuhl to learn more about her career, the role she had in the Kum & Go sale and her leadership style. The responses have been edited for clarity and brevity.

You grew up in Las Vegas, and your first job out of college was in Chicago, so how did you wind up in Des Moines? 

I moved to Des Moines on a little bit of a trial basis. My husband is from Des Moines. We moved here not really sure if we would like it. He didn’t really want to move back necessarily, but we came back and haven’t left. Here we are, 13 years later. 

What are your favorite aspects about living in Des Moines?

I think Des Moines is a great community for a lot of reasons. I always tell people that when they ask me how I like it in Des Moines. I always say it’s a really easy place to live with wonderful people. There’s good food, good people and good entertainment. There’s no traffic, which is great, at least compared to Chicago or any other big cities. I’ve found it a great place to raise my children, and I think it’s a great community. I try to get involved in any ways that I can because I think that’s a great way to get to know people and build your network.

Why is community involvement so meaningful to you? 

I think it’s really interesting how a lot of people take their skills and their talents, whether they’re innate as a person or their professional skills, for granted. And you just kind of underestimate just how helpful they can be to a nonprofit or an organization who maybe doesn’t have someone on their staff who has those skills. For me, with my financial knowledge and skills, I can look at financial statements and right away just know, ‘Oh yeah, here are 10 observations’ or ‘Have you thought about this?’ It takes 20 minutes, and it’s so helpful to them, and I think that motivates me to give back or just realize that it’s not about doing something that’s going out of your way or a burden. Anyone out there, whatever your skill is, it could be beneficial, and you can give in a way that is so appreciated. It’s so easy, it comes so naturally, whatever that thing is for any person. That’s your skill, and you don’t think of it as work, or you don’t think of it as hard, and for a lot of nonprofits, they don’t have those skill sets on staff. And it just makes such a difference, even 30 minutes, an hour. I think that’s been something I learned earlier on in my career and in just my time of service is that it feels great to be able to help them. And then also, it is a skill to raise money, ask people for money. I think as you work in nonprofits and have been a part of a number of different capital campaigns, fundraising campaigns, I chaired the Tocqueville Society campaign this year, so once you get that skill figured out of how to ask people for money, that’s also clearly very helpful for nonprofits. It’s scary when you don’t know how to do it, or when you’re uncomfortable with it. Once you kind of get that mastered a little bit, you can add so much value to an organization, and it’s not that hard. 

You said you originally weren’t considering leaving Athene, so why did you feel the CFO opening at Kum & Go was such a good fit?

I appreciated the way the Krause family led the organization through their own values as people, how that translated into the organization’s values. I think a lot of companies have values, and I think at Krause Group, those come to life in a really meaningful way through what we do and how we work together. I just really enjoyed that about meeting them. As I continued those conversations when I wasn’t really actively looking, it felt like people that I could work with really well. Everyone gets to choose where they drive their car every day to work, and when I thought about the possibility of being here, it felt good. I could see that being a really good fit for me. And me being very motivated not just for the job but for the organization and to work with Kyle and Tanner coming into the organization. It was an interesting time. Things come when you least expect it, and this was one of them. 

Are there any other accomplishments, either individually or as an organization, that you’ve especially been proud of? 

I think the [Kum & Go] transaction we did in 2023 is a huge accomplishment. It will likely be the largest transaction I ever do in my career. I think it’s one of the biggest transactions that will happen in Des Moines, in Iowa. It’s hard to not call that an accomplishment, but that’s not my accomplishment. It was all of us. I played a significant role in the transaction, but ultimately it was Kyle’s [Krause’s] transaction and the Krause Group’s transaction. My personality is maybe less inclined to point to transaction-type accomplishments. I lean more toward that people stuff. 

Will you share about the role you had in the sale?

I was kind of the key point person running the deal. I worked with our investment bankers, prepared transaction documents, sale documents and marketing documents. I ran point on some of the management meeting preparation. I was really kind of involved in all pieces from the beginning until the end of really selecting our team, our external advisers and who we would be working with preparing those marketing materials and launching the deal, working with diligence with different counterparties who we worked with along the way as potential buyers for Kum & Go and Solar Transport. Once we got to announcing the deal in April [2023], the bulk of my work was all kind of culminating up until that. And then once it was kind of out in public, then you have every person in the company to help you, and so a lot of the work went out further after that. It was clearly something that was kept very tight with a small group of people. It was clearly a privilege with the Krause family to be able to play the role that I did in helping Kyle get that across the finish line. 

You mentioned that opportunities like those don’t come around very often, so how were you able to prepare yourself to take on that role, and what did you learn from it?

There’s really no preparing yourself. It’s a significant amount of work, and there’s no training or preparation that you could probably have for that. In terms of what I learned, just being able to have a front-row seat to a transaction through every stage – I’ve played a role in other transactions in the past where I was involved in a portion of it – so I think just knowledge of the end-to-end transaction process as a whole, there’s probably an endless number of things that I learned. At the end of the day, the other big lesson is it takes a lot of work from a lot of people to get something like that done, and you have to work together as a team, make difficult decisions, challenging decisions. If I had to boil it down to one thing, I think the importance of clear, regular communication, you gotta keep everyone informed, being the hub or the main coordinator, kind of point person – just constantly making sure that the right people have the right information. I was keeping Kyle in the loop. When a decision needed to be made, just make sure the right person had it. I think just regular, clear communication makes everything go smoother, so that was really a very, very important part of my job through the entire transaction.

What kind of effects has the sale had now on the Krause Group? 

The obvious one that everyone knows is Kum & Go and Solar are now owned by Maverik, which also means that they’ve moved out of [the Krause Gateway Center at 1459 Grand Ave. in Des Moines]. It also means Krause Group has two fewer companies in its portfolio and now will move to a stage of deploying capital into new investments. Krause Group has really entered a very new era of its existence and will continue to grow and expand but in a very different way than we were a year ago. 

Now that you’ve become chief of staff, how has your work changed since stepping into that role?

I do a lot less of the finance day to day. I have a great team of finance folks here in the business who have taken on some more responsibilities and stepped up in their different areas. I think as a member of our senior team, I’m never out of finance things. It’s kind of a role of the senior team as a whole, but less time on day-to-day finance, more time I’d say managing our strategic priorities more broadly, a lot more time keeping everything moving smoothly. What roadblocks need removed? What problems need solved? What decisions need made? Keeping things kind of moving forward, and that’s very cross-functional. I worked largely in finance previously, but then also as a member of our senior team, you naturally have more broader cross-functional conversations and discussions. I would say I’ve shifted much more into those cross-functional really across all aspects of the business, our existing businesses, potential new investments. Again, we still have some remaining transaction stuff with Maverik that is through the [transitional service agreement] period, which is normal, as we still are kind of trying to decouple from each other. There’s really probably not much that my role doesn’t touch now. It’s pretty broad. It’s other duties as assigned. It’s mostly 90% that. What needs done to keep things moving forward, to keep us focused on our priorities and to keep things moving smoothly? There are so many different ways that chief of staff jobs exist. If you Google chief of staff, you get a ton of different job descriptions, and there are no two chief of staff jobs that are the same or alike. And so it’s been a fun opportunity to kind of take all of the skills that I had and everything I’ve learned into a new, broader impact area for me.

What does receiving the Deloitte CFO of the Year award mean to you? 

Any recognition like this is great to get. It’s great that it aligns with a year with a massive transaction that I was involved in, too. It was a significant year for me professionally as a whole between all aspects of the transaction and just to have this recognition after such a significant professional year is an honor.