Jennifer Moses and the arithmetic of forever

Forever is an ambitious word to put near a balance sheet. It invites questions an accountant is professionally obliged to ask. Who pays for the next year? What happens if the plan changes? How much patience can the business afford? Jennifer Moses now leads a company that has made a long ownership horizon part of its identity. Her arrival in the CEO office gives that abstract idea a very practical custodian.

In 2026, Moses became president and chief executive of Investors Management Corporation, the Raleigh company known as IMC. She had joined as CFO in 2023. The progression has the tidy appearance of a career announcement: one organization, two titles, three years. The more interesting story lies in the work that preceded it, and in the different sorts of responsibility those jobs required.

An accounting career can be described as a succession of increasingly large numbers. Moses’s path offers another way to read it. She has worked on tax, on explaining decisions, on the finances of young companies, on public reporting and on boards. It is a career spent at several distances from the same problem: understanding a business well enough to take responsibility for what happens next.

The accountant who also worked on the words

Moses earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting at Penn State. Her early professional work was at Deloitte, where she provided tax services before taking on strategic planning and internal communications responsibilities in the office of Deloitte Tax’s chief executive. The combination is easy to skim past. It deserves a moment.

Tax work requires careful interpretation. Internal communications asks whether another person can follow the interpretation. A calculation may be correct and its explanation still fail. Anyone who has sat through a presentation with seventeen footnotes on one slide knows that accuracy and understanding do not automatically travel together.

These are different disciplines, but they meet whenever an organization makes a consequential choice. Someone must understand the details. Someone must explain the decision. Someone must listen when the explanation produces a question rather than applause. Moses’s early responsibilities placed finance and communication inside the same career, long before her name appeared beside a CEO title.

That history helps explain why a profile of her cannot be contained entirely inside a spreadsheet. There are numbers in the story, certainly. There are also the people who need to make sense of them. A chief executive lives at the junction between those two audiences, even when the job description gives the junction a grander name.

A seat inside the business

At Rankin McKenzie, Moses became a partner and served venture-backed companies as an acting chief financial officer and controller. Those roles put a financial professional close to the everyday machinery of a business. The glamorous language of venture investment tends to arrive before the less glamorous questions about financial records, spending and responsibility. Eventually, the questions catch up.

There is a useful distinction between giving advice and accepting a role inside a company. A controller or CFO has to help make the financial picture usable. Plans need to meet the accounts. Decisions need to meet the available resources. Even an exciting business has bills with thoroughly unexciting due dates.

In 2015, Moses joined G1 Therapeutics in finance leadership. In May 2019, she was appointed CFO after serving as vice president of finance. Her responsibilities included reporting to the Securities and Exchange Commission, financial planning and analysis, and treasury. The title brought a public company’s financial obligations into her remit.

Public reporting has an audience far beyond the immediate team. A financial account must make sense to people who were absent from the conversation that produced it. That changes the work of explanation. The internal understanding of a decision has to survive its journey into a formal document.

Board service added another perspective. In July 2021, Moses joined Viridian Therapeutics’ board and was appointed chair of its audit committee. An executive job and a director’s job ask different things of the person holding them. One operates within management; the other participates in oversight. Her career has included both.

In March 2023, G1 announced her departure from the CFO role and a continuing position as senior advisor. The next month, IMC’s appointment of Moses as CFO was publicly reported. The change took her into a privately held owner of businesses, with a different relationship to time and capital.

The longest clock in the room

IMC began in 1971. Its restaurant venture, Golden Corral, opened in Fayetteville in 1973. More than half a century later, Moses succeeded Stuart Frantz as CEO. She entered an established company with an established philosophy, rather than an empty office waiting for someone to invent one.

Today IMC reports seven partner companies and more than 75,000 people across its family of businesses. Those figures describe the wider operating network, not the staff sitting in the Raleigh office. The distinction matters. Moses leads an ownership company whose responsibilities extend through separate businesses and the people who run them.

IMC uses internal capital and describes its ideal ownership horizon as indefinite. In plain terms, that gives its leaders a reason to consider what a decision will mean after the current reporting period. A company intended to remain in the family is a continuing responsibility.

“When you think in terms of decades instead of weeks, months and quarters, it changes your whole horizon”Jennifer Moses, on IMC’s approach to ownership

The appeal of that sentence is obvious. The difficulty sits inside it. Thinking in decades still requires knowing what happened this month. Patience can support a worthwhile investment; it can also become a pleasant description for postponing a hard decision. The discipline of finance gives long-term language a set of questions it has to answer.

This is where Moses’s CFO background becomes particularly relevant to the CEO story. Her earlier IMC role covered finance and operations. The new role broadens the responsibility, but the underlying questions remain useful. What is the business doing? What resources does it require? What assumptions deserve another look?

The office photograph offers a modest setting for an immodest word like forever: desks, doors, daylight. Business philosophies eventually have to fit into ordinary working rooms. They have to be expressed through decisions someone can understand and actions someone can carry out.

Trust, with the paperwork attached

Moses spoke about the personal side of leadership well before becoming IMC’s CEO. In a 2019 interview, she emphasized making connections with individuals on a team, helping colleagues know the person behind the role and building confidence through those relationships.

“Being able to make connections with the individuals on your team helps build a relationship of trust.”Jennifer Moses, 2019

There is a small public example of that outlook in a LinkedIn comment to a departing colleague named Tyler. Moses offered help, including a reference, and encouraged him to stay in touch. It is an ordinary professional gesture. Its ordinariness is what makes it useful. The idea of supporting people becomes clearer when it takes the form of an offer someone can accept.

That comment establishes a moment of support, rather than an entire personality. Still, it gives the leadership discussion a human scale. A reference requires somebody to put their judgment behind another person. Keeping in touch asks for a relationship to continue beyond the immediate employment arrangement.

For an owner and an operating leader, trust has practical consequences. They need enough confidence in one another to discuss a problem before it becomes a surprise. They also need enough clarity to know who is responsible for solving it. Warm feelings alone cannot settle that arrangement. Neither can a beautifully organized reporting pack.

Moses’s combination of finance and communication experience makes this relationship worth examining. The reporting provides a common account of the business. The relationship makes it possible to discuss what that account means. A CEO has to attend to both, including when the conversation is uncomfortable.

An opportunity, and an obligation

In that same 2019 interview, Moses expressed a hope that women would continue seeking opportunities to lead, and that people already in senior positions would make those opportunities available. It was a statement about access from both sides: the person asking and the person able to open a door.

Seven years later, her appointment at IMC put her in the CEO role herself. There is a straightforward satisfaction in that chronology. It does not require pretending that a single appointment answers every question about opportunity. It gives her earlier remarks a concrete point of connection with her own career.

The new job also places her within an existing leadership arrangement. IMC’s board chair is Easter Maynard. The partner companies have their own operating leaders. Moses’s task belongs in that network of responsibilities, where the owner’s perspective and the business leader’s perspective have to coexist.

Her route to this position has been gradual: professional services, financial consulting, corporate finance, governance, an ownership company’s CFO role and then its chief executive office. Read together, those jobs suggest an apprenticeship in how organizations account for themselves, to investors, colleagues and the people entrusted with their future.

Forever will remain a demanding word. It carries no guarantee that a business will endure, and it makes the daily choices more consequential. For Jennifer Moses, the word now comes with a job attached. The arithmetic has to add up. The relationships have to hold. Tomorrow will bring another set of decisions.