When Marianne Markowitz joined Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign as a financial-operations consultant in January 2007, she had no clue that what started with 30 staff members, a three-person financial-operations team, and one retail bank account would become the largest Presidential fund-raising effort in U.S. history.
The campaign “had nothing. There was just so much work to do,” recalls Markowitz, who after six weeks was promoted to campaign CFO in what she calls “a bit of a different career step.” Before joining the campaign, Markowitz was an international treasury consultant during a corporate spin-off. In fact, most of her career experience has been in consulting and working for start-ups or corporations in M&A. That experience wasn’t as far removed from the campaign trail as you might expect, she says; beefing up Obama’s financial operation was like working for a start-up, but with even longer hours.
With the mission accomplished, Markowitz is leaning toward a move back to the private sector, though she hasn’t ruled out a public-sector position. The one thing she knows for certain is that, after holding a seven-day-a-week job for nearly two years, she’s more than ready to take a break.