New at the top: Mark Serway's road to a job as chief financial officer at Reston's Govplace When I was young, I was pretty good with money. While all the kids were playing, I was working at a drugstore as a stock boy. In college, while students were partying on the weekends, I was working as a disc jockey at a local bar. I saved up enough to buy an old house, renovate it and rent it out to college friends. By the time I graduated, I sold the house and paid for half of my loans. Those skills came in handy during my finance career. But oddly enough, I started out in I.T. I liked to play with computers at an early age. I started as a systems analyst for a government contractor in Crystal City working for various government agencies. I was helping develop cost-estimation models that were used for Department of Defense procurements. That sparked my interest in using numbers as a career. After a few years, I started realizing how important it was to learn about the rules and regulations in the marketplace of the federal government, since it was the world's largest customers out there. Once I learned the system, I became pretty marketable at a young age. I made more money, moved to different companies and absorbed a lot of information. I was always dealing with data and numbers. But eventually, I began wondering what all the data was being used for. I realized I didn't want to just be a numbers guy. I loved systems, but I was also a people person. So I moved to the finance side. I had my first opportunity as a financial analyst to work for Boeing. It exposed me to the back-office functions like accounting, procurement and pricing. I wasn't a typical finance person that grew up in the accounting world. I was an I.T. guy that got converted. In many ways, that distinguished me. My fellow finance people would rely on systems people giving them the data, whereas I was able to interpret it myself. I accelerated to my first executive position at a company that went through several acquisitions. It gave me a nice career path that led me to various executive roles at other companies until I got the call to become a chief financial officer. Paradigm was a small company that wanted to go public. It would be my first company I took public, so I had to learn on the go and drink out of the fire hose. We were successful. We took it from being unprofitable to profitable. But I learned a few years later that the role wasn't my cup of tea. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act caused me to deal more with compliance issues than business operations. I went to Akima, which was a $300 million business when I started and in three years grew organically to $650 million. It [bought and] integrated 15 more companies and became $1 billion in size. Sometimes, bigger is not better for me. With all the bureaucracy, I missed the operational aspects of getting a company to the next level. I started assessing my passions of helping people and businesses. When I looked at Govplace, I saw the executives there had grown their business rapidly and had an entrepreneurial spirit. The chief executive was looking for the leadership and expertise that would take it to the next level. Now I'm excited to do just that using all I've learned over my career. Interview with Vanessa Small