Elmar has over 25 years of finance and operations experience in the US and Europe, helping start-ups and later-stage companies to drive and manage significant growth, implement accountability with actionable budgets, forecasts, ongoing business reviews, and action plans. His focus is on ecommerce, SaaS, consumer goods and international retail. He worked in multi-billion, international retail organizations, assuming financial leadership roles in the functional space of restructuring and refinancing; strategic repositioning & managing growth.
Elmar has strong expertise in startups, venture capital, angel funding & private equity, venture debt, M&A, strategic financial planning & modeling, system implementation, and corporate restructuring. He has an extensive record of success with managing rapid growth, the execution and integration of mergers and acquisitions, and a solid background in GAAP accounting, payroll management, human resources, budgeting, and forecasting.
Before joining Burkland, Elmar was the CFO at Because, a health and wellness ecommerce startup, were he completed an acquisition and successful integration, closed $16M B round and $5M venture debt, implemented effective internal controls which led to 50% points gross profit margin improvement and cost-saving by the outsourcing of customer service and fulfillment function. Prior to this, he was the CFO and VP of Operations at SheetMusicPlus (acquired by Hal Leonard LLC), a global ecommerce company with 60% domestic and 40% international business. There, Elmar provided financial and operational leadership by spearheading accounting, HR & finance, fulfillment & logistics, customer service, IT operations, and purchasing. He was an integral player in the strategy review process and implementing a defined growth strategy. Elmar was the lead executive managing the sale of the company.
Elmar also served as a CFO for Navio and Gbox, where he secured $5 million funding from international angel funds, negotiated $20 million debt financing, aggressively closed two acquisitions and successfully integrated inventory, accounting, and payroll systems. Before that, he was the CFO at AGENTRICS (acquired by Neogrid) where he coordinated all financial matters for the USA, Germany, France, UK, Australia, and Japan. Prior to that Elmar was the Director of Finance and Planning for the Metro Group, a $60B international retailer in Europe.
In his spare time, Elmar volunteers as mentor for startups at German Accelerator.
Elmar earned a Master’s degree in finance, accounting and controlling from the University of Applied Science, Trier, Germany and passed the CPA Exam in the US.