Karen Watkins • CFO | Arkansas Department of Veterans Affairs
Little Rock
Karen Watkins took an unusual CFO route, a path through a hundred airports.
She’s known for straightening out the books at the state veterans agency, but her first career was as a 20-year-old TWA flight attendant. “I was just a puppy,” the St. Louis native said.
Then her father suffered a stroke, eliminating her financial cushion, and the flight attendants went on strike. So she crossed the picket line, continuing to work while vowing to find a career where “union politics” wouldn’t rule her livelihood.
After marrying a Little Rock man and giving birth to a daughter, she was “lugging my accounting books in my crew kit” and stacking her classes at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
Her degree led to jobs combining accounting and IT, and at Complete Computing she helped small businesses computerize their books. Later, at Alltel, she met her “all-time favorite boss,” Susan McGowen. “She taught me you can work in a field like IT that’s dominated by men, and you don’t have to lose yourself in that.”
A health crisis and pancreas removal led Watkins to take a couple of years off. She and her husband, Ted Standerfer, also hosted many foreign exchange students, “a rewarding and lovely experience.”
Government work beckoned Watkins back, and after a stint at the state Department of Information Systems, she saw what she thought was a chance “to cut my CFO teeth and not be overwhelmed.”
Instead, she found deep fiscal trouble when she joined the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has about 200 employees and an operating budget of about $24 million. The state’s veterans home in Fayetteville was “financially insolvent,” and the agency was building another home in North Little Rock. Watkins revamped a “dark ages” accounting system and hired Matt Nokes, a key protege.
Last year, for the first time in eight years, “the department had no reportable audit findings,” Watkins said. “We welcomed our first veteran at the North Little Rock facility on Jan. 31.”
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