John Ruther is the Managing Director for O’Keefe’s Grand Rapids office. Mr. Ruther’s broad business expertise specializes in the areas of enterprise consulting, and strategic advisory services. His guidance has resulted in clients creating strong finance organizations that give better insight to cost and growth drivers, building customer focused target driven sales organizations, and achieving cost effectiveness through improvement and automation of business processes.

With a focus on privately held global companies, Mr. Ruther has worked with mid-market companies ranging from $15 million in revenues up to $1.6 billion in revenues. His background includes multi-national carve outs, post-merger integrations, ESOPs, sell side due diligence and value optimization, corporate real estate, finance transformations, e-commerce, treasury management automation, IT-Strategy, as well as traditional financial and executive leadership roles.

Prior to joining O’Keefe, Mr. Ruther provided financial and business leadership in West Michigan through executive management and transformation projects primarily to manufacturers, distributors, and wholesalers including the worldwide migration of a tier 1 automotive carve out’s finance systems. Mr. Ruther spent nearly the first 20 years of his career with a global chemical company in various progressive roles.

Mr. Ruther is a Registered Certified Public Accountant in the State of Michigan (CPA), is Accredited in Business Valuation (ABV) and Certified in Financial Forensics (CFF) by the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and is a Chartered Global Management Accountant (CGMA). He is a member of the Association for Corporate Growth (ACG)-Western Michigan, Turnaround Management Association (TMA), the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) and Michigan Institute of Certified Public Accountants (MICPA).

He received his undergraduate degree (BS in BA) from Central Michigan University and holds a Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where he graduated with the Highest Honors and was inducted into the Beta Gamma Sigma International Business Honor Society.