Kenneth
Lee

A spreadsheet with a conscience

Kenneth Lee runs the money behind one of the largest nonprofit online universities in the United States. The job is bigger than it sounds.

At Southern New Hampshire University, the finance portfolio is not just ledgers and forecasts. Lee, as CFO and Treasurer and Executive Vice President of Finance and Administration, oversees finance and accounting, financial planning and analysis, treasury, tax, internal controls, procurement, capital projects, and facilities management. That last one matters: he is responsible not only for the numbers on the page but for the actual buildings on the Hooksett campus. The institution he helps steer employs roughly 16,000 people and runs on more than a billion dollars a year. SNHU spent the last two decades turning a small regional college into a national engine of online education, and the finance function is the machinery that keeps a thing that big from wobbling.

He arrived in 2018. By then he had already done the version of his career that looks impressive on a slide and decided he wanted a different one. The pivot is the interesting part.

From billable hours to a cause

The early resume is a study in blue-chip momentum. Marketing roles at PepsiCo. Finance at Dow Corning. Then seventeen years at A.T. Kearney, the management consultancy, where he made Partner and worked across industrial and consumer products, financial services, chemicals, telecommunications, and health care. His specialty was the unglamorous, high-leverage stuff: cost reduction, business strategy, organizational design. In 2011 he moved in-house to Avery Dennison as Vice President of Global Business Services and Transformation, where he led change across finance, HR, IT, and indirect procurement at once.

Then, in 2015, the swerve. He became Chief Financial Officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Massachusetts Bay, directing every part of the organization's financial and administrative operations. Trading a consulting partnership for a nonprofit's books is not the move the spreadsheet would recommend. It was the move he made. Three years later he carried that same instinct into higher education, where a mission and a balance sheet have to live in the same room.

Career, in order

What sits under his desk

The finance and administration portfolio at SNHU is unusually broad. It is not just the accounts - it is the people, the procurement, the tax position, and the physical plant. A rough map of the responsibilities he carries:

Relative emphasis is illustrative, drawn from his stated scope of responsibility - not a financial disclosure.

Crimson, twice

The Harvard thread runs past the diplomas. He serves as President of The Harvard Club of New Hampshire and has been involved with the Harvard Alumni Association - the kind of unpaid, show-up-anyway commitment that tells you more about a person than a title does.