Spero Consulting

Andy is an expe­ri­enced con­sul­tant; a for­mer uni­ver­sity pro­fes­sor, and has worked in both mar­ket and credit risk for large finan­cial ser­vice firms.

He has con­sulted for a wide range of indus­tries on top­ics that include finance, account­ing, risk man­age­ment, infor­ma­tion, and web design & development.

His rare com­bi­na­tion – of aca­d­e­mic back­ground and pro­fes­sional expe­ri­ences across mul­ti­ple fields – allows him to rapidly develop inno­v­a­tive and cre­ative solu­tions for clients, par­tic­u­larly for orga­ni­za­tional prob­lems that span across tra­di­tional func­tional areas.

His PhD is from Carnegie Mel­lon Uni­ver­sity – from the Grad­u­ate School of Indus­trial Admin­is­tra­tion, which now the Tep­per School, and he has an MBA from the Uni­ver­sity of Pittsburgh.

As a pro­fes­sor, Andy researched infor­ma­tion, incen­tive, cor­po­rate finance, and qual­ity areas, and has won research awards from national orga­ni­za­tions in both account­ing and finance.

He has won teach­ing awards from both Exec­u­tive and Pro­fes­sional MBAs. His teach­ing at both Wash­ing­ton Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota focused on:

• Deci­sion Mak­ing and Preferences;
• Strate­gic Cost Analy­sis (the design of cost and infor­ma­tion systems);
• Con­trol & Incen­tives, includ­ing trans­fer pric­ing, bud­get­ing, and per­for­mance mea­sure­ment; and their link­age to strategy.

He is par­tic­u­larly inter­ested in the inter­sec­tion of these areas: the selec­tion of goal-​maximizing strate­gies and their com­ple­men­tary struc­tures, incen­tive mech­a­nisms, and infor­ma­tion sys­tems. To him, almost every­thing with a busi­ness or orga­ni­za­tion is a man­age­r­ial con­trol prob­lem, because con­trol prob­lems involve deter­min­ing the means to reach the ends:

1. Deter­mine what you want;
2. Deter­mine ways to get there and what’s stop­ping you from get­ting there;
3. Deter­mine ways to over­come that (or those) obstacle(s);
4. Ana­lyze the obvi­ous (and not-​so-​obvious) costs and ben­e­fits of remov­ing the obsta­cles; and
5. Choose the best way (the value-​maximizing or cost-​effective strat­egy and tac­tics) to get what you want.

He notes that when orga­ni­za­tions imple­ment iso­lated — rather than inte­grated — prac­tices and sys­tems there are often severe and neg­a­tive “unin­tended” consequences.

In addi­tion to con­sult­ing and aca­d­e­mic expe­ri­ence, Andy has exten­sive cor­po­rate risk man­age­ment expe­ri­ence span­ning both mar­ket and credit risk. Within firms, he has often served as an inter­nal con­sul­tant to other depart­ments and for exter­nal cus­tomers, too. He has developed:

• Sophis­ti­cated val­u­a­tion and risk models, including many simulations;
• Finan­cial pro­jec­tion soft­ware for merg­ers and acqui­si­tions; and
• Enterprise-​wide hypo­thet­i­cal sce­nar­ios and stress tests.

Like his Basen­jis, he likes to think of him­self as an “all-​round” hound. Andy can be reached at 412.779.9028 or via our con­tact form.