In December, Gordon Brothers announced that Norma Kuntz would be appointed CEO of the company, effective February 13, 2023. Ken Frieze and Michael Frieze will continue to serve the company as chairman and chairman emeritus, respectively.

Kuntz joined Gordon Brothers as its president and chief operating officer in June 2022 and quickly demonstrated her readiness to lead the firm. Prior to Gordon Brothers, she served as the chief operating officer and chief financial officer of global private equity at The Carlyle Group. Her nearly 25 years of financial services industry experience includes global roles within private equity, asset management, alternative investments and valuations, positioning her well to lead a multi-disciplinary global firm poised for growth.

Could you tell us a bit about your career trajectory?

I started my career at Arthur Andersen in public accounting and had wonderful experiences there, including meeting my husband. I worked predominantly with public company clients in the financial services and high-tech sectors and on numerous transactions. When Andersen was melting down, we decided to move from Boston to Washington, D.C. and I fell into alternative investing, including private credit and private equity. I initially went to work for a business development company called Allied Capital as the director of SEC Reporting. Based on my public company background, I did a lot of capital raising for the firm including numerous rights offerings, built new operations and fueled the company’s growth. While Allied was predominantly focused on mezzanine lending, the company had also moved into real estate, private equity and structured securities, so it was an extremely interesting and expansive opportunity.

I spent about 10 years at Allied and was chief valuation officer when Allied was acquired by Ares Capital. I went to Ares for a short period of time, but I was a new mom so I was working part time trying to figure out what I wanted to do—determining if I was going to work full time or stay home and how I was going to handle that balance. Ares Capital is based in New York, and I was still living in D.C. at the time when the opportunity to go over to Carlyle as CFO for the Asia private equity platform arose.

Carlyle convinced me that it was a great fit for a new mom because I could work early in the morning and be home for bath time and bedtime and then work again in the evening if I needed to, which turned out to be true—it’s just that I worked basically 24 hours a day. But I didn’t generally miss bath time or bedtime so that was good It was amazing timing in that Carlyle is an extremely entrepreneurial organization and was building out the Asia business. I was able to take everything that I had learned in my previous roles and apply it to something very different and in many ways groundbreaking. Between the multiple cultures, deal structures and jurisdictions, I was always learning and adapting and I loved that piece of it. I took over all of the emerging markets and built a fabulous team overseeing the fundmanagement for the regions including, closing acquisitions and sales, raising capital and overseeing the financial operations.

I was very lucky at Carlyle. I held a variety of roles, worked very closely with the founders and the executive leadership team, built world-class teams and when I left I was the COO and CFO of private equity, which had about $300 billion of assets under management at that time. The opportunity at Gordon Brothers piqued my interest because it is a large global company with a deep breadth of expertise within many different businesses. Ken Frieze was looking for someone to come in to build on his great leadership and take the company to the next level, which I thought was exciting. And a lot of what I had done at Carlyle was to build and knit together a large global enterprise making the different components work more closely together and leveraging the strength of the entire organization, so it seemed like a great fit.

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