Michelle R Taylor Email Address

Vice President

Guitar Center is the world's largest musical instruments retailer. Shop Guitars, Bass, Drums, Amps, DJ, Keyboards, Pro-Audio and more. Most orders ship free!

With numerous successes in finance leadership roles within Guitar Center and Lands’ End, I provide critical financial leadership that drives peak performance while achieving bottom-line financial goals. My specialty is engaging and communicating with cross-discipline stakeholders, enabling transparency and focus through complex transitions, strategic alignments and cost reduction initiatives. An insightful people leader and data-driven executive, I build cultures of collaboration, accountability and motivation that work in alignment to meet aggressive goals, improve enterprise accountability and consistently maximize results. Working in partnership across international business units, global vendors and industry thought leaders, I have built a reputation as a trusted senior advisor to Boards, C-level executives and all stakeholders. Noted for: Strategic Planning Produced and administered five-year rolling strategic financial model to detail sales growth and full P&L impact for Guitar Center brands through aligned multi-year strategic efforts, helping to meet EBITDA and long-term goals over the past few years. Enterprise Trackers Designed and implemented executive dashboards to compare prior year and plan of sales and margin for each brand at Guitar Center, delivering several straight quarters of positive enterprise sales comparisons. Margin Analysis Tool Created, introduced and updated new resource at Guitar Center to help category managers understand margin drivers, leading to cleanup of old inventory across retail stores. Market Challenge Addressed $50M sales gap at Lands’ End going into peak holiday season with cross-discipline team – merchandising, inventory and digital marketing, to deploy enterprise solutions that achieved EBITDA plan for 2008. Executive Competencies Financial Operations − Operational Excellence − General Accounting − Financial Reporting − Continuous Improvement − Financial Modeling − Data Analytics − FP&A | P&L | Budgeting − Predictive Analysis − Business Intelligence − Strategic Planning − Corporate Finance − International Business − KPI Dashboards − Margin Improvement − Cost Optimization − Process Improvements − Operational Streamlining