Todd Schonherz and the business of keeping things local

Confetti is an unusually flattering form of paperwork. On September 21, 2023, it fell around Todd Schonherz and his colleagues at Nasdaq’s MarketSite in Times Square. Schonherz rang the closing bell. American Oncology Network, the Fort Myers business he led, was marking its arrival on the exchange. The photograph offers everything a corporate milestone requires: a crowd, a logo, a ceremony, and enough airborne paper to make administration look festive.

Then the story continued. In May 2024, AON announced it would voluntarily leave Nasdaq. The following month, its shares began trading on OTCQX. On October 21, 2026, Cencora announced an agreement to acquire the company. The sequence makes Schonherz a more interesting subject than the bell photograph alone suggests. His career concerns the work that surrounds these occasions: organizing systems, running operations, choosing colleagues, and adjusting the corporate structure around a growing business.

The recurring question is deceptively ordinary. What can local businesses accomplish together that would be difficult to do separately? AON’s answer has involved shared technology, administrative support, purchasing, and financial operations. Schonherz arrived at that question through information technology. He eventually acquired a much larger set of responsibilities.

The information officer gets a wider brief

His education began with a bachelor’s degree in health policy and administration at Pennsylvania State University. His early professional experience included consulting and management positions at Datamedic Corporation, Multum Corporation, and MedE America. These were software and information businesses in an industry already accustomed to complicated organizations. His professional biography starts among the systems that help those organizations function.

At US Oncology, his positions included director of enterprise applications, vice president of information systems, and senior vice president and chief information officer. His responsibilities extended from daily technology operations to setting priorities for company initiatives. The combination matters. A system can be technically sound and still fail the people expected to use it. Deciding what gets built, funded, or postponed is already a management job.

His information technology work brought InformationWeek 500 recognition and a ComputerWorld/IDG Laureate Award. Those distinctions belong to an earlier chapter of his career, before the CEO title. They also help explain the continuity in his professional path. He worked on the machinery of organizations before taking responsibility for more of the organization itself.

In 2011, he became chief operating officer of Florida Cancer Specialists. The remit widened to daily operations at the corporate office and nearly 100 Florida locations. A technology executive deals with dependencies between systems. An operating executive also inherits dependencies between offices, teams, schedules, and budgets. The vocabulary changes; the need to make separate parts work together persists.

Perfection was never the assignment

An interview from his Florida operating years provides a useful glimpse of his management language. In spring 2015, he discussed operational excellence and an 87 percent satisfaction target. It was a specific number attached to a broad ambition: improve the experience of the people dealing with the organization.

“Operational Excellence isn’t perfection.”

Todd Schonherz · Spring 2015

He described an organization in which engaged employees looked for improvements throughout the company. The emphasis was on a continuing habit of change. That is a modest-sounding ambition with demanding practical consequences. A company can issue a new policy in an afternoon. Getting people across many locations to notice problems, suggest adjustments, and keep doing so takes longer than the announcement.

The distinction gives this part of his story some texture. The target was numerical, but the method depended on people. A percentage can tell management where it wants to go. It cannot answer the next question at every desk. Schonherz’s language left room for employees to participate in the answer. Even the phrase “operational excellence,” so easily embalmed in a presentation, had been tied to daily work.

A national network, built from the operating desk

Schonherz was AON’s chief operating officer during its early development in 2017. The network launched publicly in 2018. Those two dates describe different stages: the work of putting an organization together and the beginning of its public operating story. By January 2020, it had a presence in 11 states.

On January 27 that year, he added the president title. His responsibilities included practice operations, information technology, marketing, and oversight of shared services. The promotion gave him an expanded focus on long-term strategy. His predecessor and colleague Brad Prechtl described his contribution in terms of operational execution. Schonherz, meanwhile, pointed to productivity and improvements in how the affiliated businesses operated.

“We have made great strides in a very short time,” he said at the appointment. There is an understandable temptation to let such a sentence carry a growth story. The more revealing detail is the list of work beneath it: billing administration, contracting, purchasing, and IT. These are jobs with deadlines, exceptions, and consequences. They provide less theatrical material than a market debut, but considerably more of a working week.

The operating proposition was to handle some of those responsibilities collectively. Shared capacity could give an individual practice access to resources it would otherwise need to assemble itself. That arrangement also creates its own obligations. A central team has to understand what happens locally. A local office has to be able to depend on the central team. Distance makes clear responsibilities more valuable.

April 1 was a real promotion

On April 1, 2021, Schonherz became chief executive officer, succeeding Prechtl, who moved into the president and chief development officer role. At the time, AON described a network operating across 16 states. Schonherz had already spent years inside its operating structure. The appointment moved a familiar executive into the job with the broadest responsibility.

His professional story is therefore a succession of widening briefs. Technology had required decisions about systems and priorities. Operations had added day-to-day responsibility across locations. The chief executive role brought the company’s mission, strategy, operations, and finances into one remit. He also became a member of its board.

In May 2023, EY named him an Entrepreneur Of The Year Florida Award finalist. The distinction was finalist status, a precise achievement worth keeping precise. By then, his career combined long service inside established organizations with the work of building AON. Entrepreneurship here had a corporate operating history behind it, rather than a sudden appearance at the moment of recognition.

The bell, and the decision after the bell

The public market chapter followed AON’s business combination with Digital Transformation Opportunities Corp. The completion announcement came in September 2023; trading under the AONC symbol began on September 21. Schonherz’s bell ceremony marked a change in the company’s corporate life, and supplied the confetti photograph.

Eight months later, the board announced a voluntary Nasdaq delisting. Its independent special committee had considered several factors, including limited analyst coverage, the absence of an active trading market, and the personnel resources and expenses associated with disclosure and listing requirements. These were the company’s stated reasons for the decision. They make a useful counterweight to the ceremony.

The two events belong together. A public listing brings a recognizable milestone, but the company still has to assess the costs and demands of maintaining it. AON began OTCQX trading on June 10, 2024. Schonherz remained chief executive through that change in venue. The operating business and the place its shares traded were related questions, each with its own practical considerations.

Read together, the dates resist an overly neat corporate biography. A career includes decisions made after the celebratory photograph. For an executive whose earlier work involved allocating resources and setting priorities, those less photogenic decisions belong near the center of the account.

A CEO still needs an operating team

In June 2024, David Afshar joined AON as chief financial and operating officer. The combined title brought two functions within the same executive remit. Schonherz emphasized Afshar’s experience in both areas. It was a concrete addition to the leadership structure at a moment when the company was also changing its trading venue.

In May 2025, AON appointed Joe Verschleiser chief growth and performance officer, assigning him responsibility for growth strategy, performance improvement, and new business opportunities for partner practices. These appointments put names and responsibilities around the CEO. An executive profile can make a company seem to run on one person’s intentions. An organization chart is a useful corrective.

Schonherz’s own operating background gives those appointments an additional relevance. He had occupied versions of the jobs that turn strategy into assignments. As chief executive, he needed colleagues to carry substantial responsibilities of their own. The work of building an organization includes deciding who will have the authority to do its work.

The next chapter has conditions attached

On October 21, 2026, Cencora announced a definitive agreement to acquire AON. The proposed transaction would place the business in a larger corporate organization. Cencora had been an investor in AON since 2020, so the announcement involved an existing relationship. Schonherz presented the agreement as a continuation of the organization’s established mission.

As of October 22, the transaction remained subject to required regulatory clearances, AON stockholder approval, and other customary closing conditions. The board had approved the agreement following the unanimous recommendation of a special committee of independent and disinterested directors. An agreement gives the next chapter a direction. The approvals still have to arrive.

Schonherz’s route to that point runs from information systems to operations to corporate leadership. Across those changes, the same organizational question keeps returning: which responsibilities should be shared, and how should that shared work serve local businesses? His next set of decisions will give the question another setting. The confetti has long since been swept away. There is work on the desk.