Beyond Numbers

Meredith Zdon learned an important lesson from her prior accounting experience that she has instilled in her current position as COO of St. Petersburg-based Power Design Inc.

Her first job out of college was at Arthur Andersen LLP, where she worked as an auditor in the Sarasota office for four years until 2002. That was when Andersen closed its doors nationwide as a result of the Enron Corp. scandal, which actually involved only one segment of the firm's Houston office.

As a result, Zdon now has a bottom-line policy for the hundreds of employees of Power Design, a national electrical contractor headquartered along Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard: “What you do on a project has an impact on the entire organization,” she says.

Zdon took on her current role at Power Design in 2003 after a transitional stint at Aidman Piser & Co. in Tampa. Rather than simply serving as an accountant, she says she has always been more interested in the overall operations of companies.

“Operations drives the numbers,” Zdon says. As an added incentive to pursue her current career track, she says she previously took a behavioral test while job-hunting after the Andersen shutdown and the results stated that she did not reflect the “normal traits” of an accountant.

Besides implementing such tests at Power Design, Zdon has also helped with other non-numerical tasks such as designing the company's Web site and garnering employee input into setting company policies and values. Theoretically, workers are more inclined to follow rules that they helped make. “That helped from a buy-in perspective,” she says.

Now second in command at Power Design, which is working on projects in 14 states, Zdon joined the company when it had only 15 employees in a 5,000-square-foot office. Three years ago it moved into the former Halkey Roberts Corp. medical device manufacturing plant after gutting and rebuilding the 75,000-square-foot interior.

Because Power Design has no regional offices, projects across the country are supervised from its St. Petersburg base. Weekly meetings and training sessions take place locally, while distribution of light fixtures for projects is handled through a 104,000-square-foot center near Atlanta.

Although she works in a male-dominated field, Zdon says she has no reservations about getting out of the office and going to job sites wearing a hard hat, jeans and work boots. It's the best way to see the company's processes first hand, as well as find out what its employees need.

“I'm learning every day,” she says. “We are continually trying to improve our organization.”

Zdon, who has a master's degree in accounting from the University of South Florida, describes herself as a type A personality and someone who likes being in control. If the opportunity arises to move up to the CEO position at Power Design, she says she's ready.

“This is my passion,” she says. “If I didn't love it, I would never want to do that.”