When Clark signed on as Delphi's CFO in 2010, the company, with $14 billion in sales, had just left bankruptcy, and was preparing for an IPO, which it registered in May of this year.

“My challenges coming into the job were obvious,” he says. “For example, I saw a need for increased visibility and financial rigor around the allocation of capital and related rates of return by existing and future product lines. We knew which businesses were contributing and which were not, but not as well as we could know.”

Then there was the planned IPO. “That called for simplifying the capital structure and repurchasing shares,” Clark notes. “We had three classes of stock. We used cash, bank and high-yield debt to repurchase the A and C shares, making the IPO easier.”

Clark has moved Delphi from a $3 billion cash position when he joined in 2010 to $1.5 billion in cash and $2.5 billion in debt on the balance sheet currently.

Once the company emerged from bankruptcy, it began issuing quarterly reports to shareholders, as if it were public, in anticipation of the coming IPO. Clark says he worked to enhance that reporting, “to get us into the groove” of being a public company, an effort where his experience as CFO of publicly traded Fisher Scientific came into play.

Looking forward, Clark says he's focusing on helping Delphi expand through internal growth and strategic acquisitions and establishing a cost structure that allows the company, whose fortunes are closely linked to the performance of the auto industry, to “maintain a strong cash flow position and profitability in all parts of the auto cycle.”

Currently, Delphi sells only about 10% of its products outside the automobile industry. While the company will continue to be tied primarily to the auto industry, Clark says one goal of the acquisition campaign is to expand into the commercial vehicle space and other transportation areas.