A Conversation with Jimmi Sue Smith, CFO, Koppers

Great, thank you. So I'm in the Chief Financial Officer role. In that role, all the financial functions of the company report up to me: accounting, internal audit, we have a shared services center here in Pittsburgh, the controllers, and we're beginning a new financial planning and analysis function which we will be announcing shortly.

We believe that the company will get a lot of benefit out of having additional analysis performed here at the corporate level. We have a lot of analysis done in each of our business units and they understand their business, but more of a consolidated picture so that we understand as Koppers, when we go out and speak to the investor community, to our banks, and to the rating agencies, what the company is doing and what's driving the company's performance as a whole.

Sure, absolutely. My husband Matt works in supply chain for Nestle North America. We have been married, it will be 23 years in June of this year. Thank you. Seems like two years and then sometimes seems more like 53, so it depends on the day. But we have three beautiful children: they are six, eight, and just turned 11. Two boys and a girl. The girl is the princess in the middle, of course. My sons: JR is my oldest and Beau is my youngest. They are hockey players. Beau plays baseball. JR is really a renaissance man; he also plays the cello and does chess, and he is testing this weekend for his advanced red belt in karate, so he's going to be a black belt someday. Fantastic. And my daughter Charlie Anne is amazing. She is unfortunately right now in an elbow race because she hurt herself doing competitive cheer, which is her passion.

Yeah, absolutely. Link Parents has been very focused on appealing and being inclusive, so it's not just for people who are here in Pittsburgh. If any of you tuned in to our social media training, you know, as parents, my kids have a device. I don't know most of the time when I look at them, I don't always know what they're doing on it. So we had some training on how to keep your kids safe online, and that was really amazing. We had people on that training asking questions and coming through; I didn't know who they were or where they worked, and I had to go look them up. I think that's great. So we are really looking to serve the entire Koppers community of parents and people who want to be supportive of parents. Let us know. We did some how-to-pay-for-college; there's lots of ideas out there that people as parents are struggling with or need a little help. We want to be able to provide that programming. So please give us feedback as to what would be important to you, and please tune in because I think this ERG is doing really great things and providing really exceptional programming.

I am really proud of Koppers and its commitment to sustainability. I think a lot of people, especially today, talk about sustainability and they have some words out there, but they don't have the really hard work and the underlying focus on what that means to their business that we do here at Koppers. So I'm really excited as we move forward to make sure people are seeing that on the outside the way that we see it on the inside, because I think there are a lot of people who talk more about it but do less, and I think we do more and people don't see it because you don't associate it with manufacturing companies that much. So I think being a leader in that area and actually the real work that we've done around goals and how we meet the goals makes me very proud to be part of this team.

Well, I put all three of my children in cloth diapers. All of my children went through cloth. I actually will give a little plug: it's way easier than you think it is. Totally manageable. They have beautiful organic cotton bamboo with snaps; there's no safety pins or anything like that you might think about. It's very, very doable.

If you weren't doing this, if you didn't go into business, what would you be doing?

Thanks Jimmy. Thank you.