John Terry is the founder and President of ChurchillTerry, a management consulting and financial advisory firm formed in 1996 to provide Fortune 500-quality services to middle-market businesses. He is also now in his 24th year as an Adjunct Professor at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University, teaching entrepreneurship as well as finance for private enterprises. A life-long entrepreneur and investor, Mr. Terry has co-founded or provided early-stage funding for more than a dozen other ventures.
At ChurchillTerry, Mr. Terry developed the “fractional ownership” concept for corporate accounting departments, allowing businesses to outsource some or all of their financial functions, regardless of sophistication level. Beyond the complete suite of internal financial work, the firm offers capital formation/restructuring, Quality of Earnings reporting, transaction support work, and valuation services. The consulting side offers a variety of services focused on leadership development and business performance, frequently facilitating management retreats and planning sessions as well as developing internal executive education programs. ChurchillTerry’s clients are diverse, nationwide, and both public and private, including firms in healthcare, law, technology, manufacturing, consumer goods, and food. To date, the company has assisted with over $100 million in funding and transaction decisions, frequently working with investment groups, family offices and high net worth individuals as well as corporate clients.
More recently, Mr. Terry developed and introduced The MBA MIND® for Attorneys in 2011. This program is designed to provide a competitive advantage for attorneys at all stages of their career by distilling core topics taught in the top business graduate programs into a series of 10 half-day seminars. Using knowledge developed working with attorneys on The MBA MIND®, in 2015 he delved into the rising disruption in the legal industry and developed a new education program on THE FUTURE OF LAW to assist firms in preparing to thrive over the next decade.
He and a partner also spent a decade developing and managing a series of three quantitative hedge funds together.
This intersection of business and education is largely responsible for Mr. Terry’s success at SMU where he teaches entrepreneurship in the Cox School’s highly-ranked Executive MBA program (he was named “Most Valuable EMBA Professor” in Spring of 2018). He has also taught private equity and venture capital, and he continues to teach the Private Equity / Venture Capital Practicum, a course he developed in 2003 that pairs graduate students with local PE and VC firms in the field to look for deals to feed the SMU MBA Venture Fund. Mr. Terry serves as Fund Manager for the fund (with more than a dozen portfolio companies presently) where he is also a current and founding board member. To date, he has taught over two thousand graduate students.
Prior to founding ChurchillTerry and teaching at SMU, Mr. Terry served in a variety of engineering and executive positions in the broadcast industry where he led the team that developed the first microprocessor controlled television transmitter, worked with engineering firms providing test equipment for the development of digital television, and sold the satellite distribution solutions to all of the major networks for their conversion to high definition and digital television.
Mr. Terry has appeared on NBC Dallas repeatedly speaking on financial topics such as PPP and ERC, and has been quoted in the magazines Bloomberg Businessweek, Inc., and Entrepreneur, as well as major papers nationwide including The Dallas Morning News and The Atlanta Journal. Mr. Terry often serves as a panelist or moderator on topics relating to finance, entrepreneurship and strategy, and has produced multiple panels on the Family Office for the Southwest Venture Forum as well as been a featured speaker at the Texas Society of CPAs. He currently sits on the Truist Bank Community Advisory Board, is a charter board member of the North Texas Private Equity Counsel, and and holds limited partnership interests in a boutique M&A firm as well as two venture funds and a debt fund.
Mr. Terry holds an MBA from SMU where he graduated near the top of his class, and a BA in Radio-TV-Film from Valdosta State University where he graduated with honors. He has been married to the love of his life for nearly 39 years, and Kathy and John have two wonderful daughters.