Gary Crittenden

The chief financial officer of Citigroup in 2008 later ran the Missionary Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a job that came with a fleet of about 19,000 vehicles and, at his request, no salary. That is Gary Crittenden's career in one sentence, and the two halves explain each other less than you might expect. He was a finance man first. Ogden, Utah, a family paint and glass store, student body president at Ogden High in 1971, two years as a missionary in Germany, a management degree from Brigham Young University in 1976 and a Harvard MBA in 1979: the standard Utah executive kit, assembled early. Wikipedia gives the birth year, 1953, and nothing more precise.

Bain & Company came next. He stayed twelve years working on strategy projects in the United States and Germany, made partner, helped open the Munich office and shared a cubicle with Ken Chenault, who would later hire him at American Express; Mitt Romney and David Checketts were friends from the same period, according to a 2024 Utah Business profile. The CFO jobs then came in a run. Filene's Basement, which he helped take public. Melville Corporation, where he led an 18-month restructuring that sold Thom McAn and Foot Action and took Linens 'n Things and Wilsons Leather public. The remainder renamed itself CVS Corporation, and Wikipedia credits the breakup with a significant rise in the share price. Sears, Roebuck from 1997 to 1998. Monsanto from 1998 to 2000, where he led the purchases of DeKalb Genetics and Delta and Pine Land and worked on the sale of the company to Pharmacia & Upjohn. Then American Express in 2000, under Chenault.

The American Express years were the good years. The company put the card business back at the center, spun off its financial advisory arm as Ameriprise Financial in 2005, and gave Crittenden the Global Network Services division to run alongside the finance job. Institutional Investor named him one of the best CFOs in America in 2004 and again in 2006. He watched the September 11 attacks from his office on the 51st floor of the World Financial Center, according to Utah Business. Citigroup hired him as CFO in March 2007. The SEC's later account of what followed is the plainest one available: in 2007 Citigroup told investors that its investment bank's subprime exposure was $13 billion or less, while the real figure was above $50 billion, the difference being super-senior tranches of collateralized debt obligations and liquidity puts worth more than $40 billion that had not been counted. On July 29, 2010, Citigroup paid $75 million and Crittenden paid $100,000 to settle the SEC's charges; neither admitted nor denied them. In between, the job was dismantling. Wikipedia's summary is that Crittenden's financial management during the crisis cut about 75,000 jobs and around $500 billion of assets. On March 20, 2009, Citi announced a split of the company into the parts it wanted to keep and the parts it wanted to sell, made Crittenden chairman of the second half, Citi Holdings, and gave the CFO job to Edward Kelly. The 8-K described Citi Holdings as holding a significant portion of Citigroup's assets and paired Crittenden with Mike Corbat, its interim chief executive, to get the best price for businesses the bank no longer wanted. He held the post for less than four months. On July 9, 2009, Citi filed an 8-K saying Crittenden was leaving to move to Utah and spend more time on his family and other business interests; chief executive Vikram Pandit's line in it thanked him for "his various roles." The record is unusual in that the same man was named a top CFO twice and then paid a personal SEC penalty, all inside six years. You can read the penalty as small next to the $75 million corporate fine, or as a personal charge with his name on it. Both readings are fair, and the settlement language was written so that neither has to be tested.

He joined Huntsman Gay Global Capital, the Palo Alto private equity firm now called HGGC, in 2009, the year he left Citi; Utah Business notes that Steve Young, the former quarterback, was among the partners he worked alongside. He was chief executive from April 2012 to August 2013, when co-founder Richard Lawson took the job and Crittenden became chairman, and he stepped back from day-to-day management in 2016. The firm now lists him as an executive director, an advisor rather than an employee. The deals from his stretch in charge, per Wikipedia:

• Power Holdings, a utility services roll-up that grew from about 90 crews to more than 200 in two years, sold to Kelso & Co. for $380 million out of the $1.1 billion Fund I.
• Fund II, raised on criteria of $100 million or more in revenue, enterprise values of $100 million to $500 million and EBITDA of at least $15 million.
• Citadel Plastics, where he was chairman, bought Lucent Polymers in December 2013, its seventh acquisition since 2007 and HGGC's 31st.
• iQor, where he was also chairman, bought Jabil's aftermarket services business for $725 million in January 2014, taking iQor past $1.5 billion in revenue and 31,000 employees in 16 countries.

His own framing of the Lucent deal, per Wikipedia, was growth by buying and folding in complementary businesses, and Citadel's gain was a portfolio of more than 1,400 resin formulations. For iQor he said the Jabil purchase gave customers a "considerably larger global footprint." Neither line is memorable, which is the point; the HGGC years read like a CFO's portfolio rather than a dealmaker's.

Board seats have run alongside: Staples, TJX, Ryerson and Primerica per Wikipedia; Extra Space Storage, Primerica, Zions Bancorporation and, as lead independent director, Pluralsight per the HGGC bio and Wikipedia. Weber State University gave him an honorary doctorate in 2003. The BYU Marriott School's national advisory council, which he has sat on since 2001, currently lists him as a private investor at Bear Mountain Ranch Asset Management in California.

Church service ran in parallel the whole way: bishop, president of the Yorktown New York Stake during the Wall Street years, area seventy, and then, in 2017, managing director of the Missionary Department, the administrative arm behind the volunteer force. Utah Business reported that he declined a salary, oversaw the department's global finances and housing along with its fleet of 19,000 vehicles, and pushed through the three changes the magazine lists: missionaries working on social media, a weekly call home, updated dress standards. The magazine dates his tenure 2016 to 2019; Wikipedia says 2017; take the overlap. Whether the CFO habits transferred is not something the sources measure, though the habits themselves are on record: Utah Business has him running three miles every weekday and six to ten on Saturdays for more than 45 years, and sitting down every Sunday for 35 years to review a written list of five life priorities. A man who audits himself weekly and refuses a salary is consistent with a man who audited Citigroup's balance sheet and paid a $100,000 penalty on the result. Consistent, not explained.

The record is thin on one thing: his own account of the Citi years. The fetched sources carry no interview in which he discusses the subprime disclosures, and the SEC settlement was structured so that he never had to. The one line the profile leaves you with is his own, about the cubicle he shared at Bain: "Always be a friend because you never know where your friends end up."

Citigroup paid $75 million. Its former CFO paid $100,000. Neither admitted anything.