Employee Profile: Tom McKenna

Thomas J. McKenna: Boston Business Journal CFO of the Year 2020 Nominee

Aptima, Inc. is proud to nominate Thomas J. McKenna for the Boston Business Journal CFO of the Year Award for 2020. This award recognizes the top chief financial officers and their teams who deliver the most outstanding performance for their Massachusetts companies.

With the COVID pandemic hitting during the first quarter of the year, C-suite leaders had to make hard decisions to keep their companies in business, decisions that would affect employees, customers, and the economy. Tom quickly pivoted, working with his colleagues on the Aptima Executive Team, to ensure that Aptima maintained full operations despite staff across the country working remotely. More specifically:

• Tom researched all aspects of the fiscal incentives provided by the Government; his detailed research and excellent communication skills allowed Executive management to make informed decisions during this time of COVID-19 with confidence.
• He quickly adapted Aptima’s budgets to the new COVID-19 climate; this required massive amounts of communication within the organization within a very short period of time.
• Tom has been a member of the company’s internal COVID-19 response team, helping to shape all necessary policy changes required to navigate through this crisis; and has been instrumental in creating the company’s pandemic response plans that ensured the vast majority of employees could work from home while creating and maintaining a safe environment for those who must come into the office.
• Throughout the pandemic, Tom continues to show up to the office every day despite the fact that the vast majority of employees per our pandemic response plan are working from home to ensure business continuity.
• He was the lead in securing a Payroll Protection Program to ensure that staff labor plans stayed full even when Government facility closures created labor coverage issues for staff who regularly travel to Government facilities for work.
• Tom continues to lead Aptima’s post-COVID return to work committee, which is shaping what the future of what work will look like.
• Last, but not least importantly, Tom has been equal parts strategic and empathetic when it comes to the pandemic; he has been willing to bend over backwards for the good of the company and its employees, while maintaining a strategic financial prowess that allowed us to stay in the black.

Tom and his team at Aptima have done an amazing job in 2020. Under Tom’s leadership, not only has Aptima avoided any employee furloughs or layoffs, but we have hired more than 17 new employees and 9 interns since the beginning of pandemic. Aptima congratulates Tom on this most deserved nomination for the Boston Business Journal 2020 CFO of the Year.