Right out of college, I started in public accounting. I joined a small firm that was based in the Washington, D.C., area. It was great. The senior partner there had almost 50 years of public accounting experience and he really developed a client base which covered everything from car dealership owners to large military supply contractors to the government.

I was thrown into everything from year-end financial statements to tax-return preparation to audit to general accounting consulting services. It was tremendous, but what I discovered early on was that to be able to give good financial advice I really needed to be able to better understand the private sector, so after almost four years, I left public accounting and landed a job as an assistant controller for a company in Washington, D.C., that provided travel insurance services. Let's say you had an emergency while traveling and your credit card covered your trip, you would call the 800-number on the back of your credit card and we were the company you spoke to.

It was an international operation -- at least 80 percent of the staff spoke two languages. That proved crucial even in the finance department because we received a lot of paperwork from all over the globe written in different languages. This was my first experience in international finance. I learned that working styles and reporting standards and requirements differ around the globe. That was, and still is, interesting to me.

I left that job after two years because my husband was offered a great job in Singapore. We went without any expectation of me working. I was very fortunate to land a job almost immediately with KPMG Peat Marwick in their international tax department. I provided tax services to U.S. citizens working in Asia and companies in Singapore that needed to file tax returns in the U.S. I worked for them almost four years until we left Singapore.

In 2001, while living in the Philippines, Cormant started and the owners of the company said, "You seem to have a little time on your hands, Catherine, why don't you provide us with some of your expertise and help us get off the ground?" Within a couple of years, the board said, "Why don't you be our CFO? You've known us from the ground up, why don't you just go for it?" I've been with them ever since. Of course while all this was going on I was raising two small children, so it really made me focus on what is important to get the job done.