Jaye Mcdermott

Jaye McDermott is a Partner at Rankin McKenzie, LLC, a Cary, North Carolina–based firm that places fractional and interim CFOs and Controllers with private, growth-stage companies. She joined the firm as a Partner in 2011 and brings over 25 years of accounting and management experience, providing CFO/Controller and advisory services, project support, and staff training to client organizations.

Her career before Rankin McKenzie was built largely in industry finance. During and after law school she worked as a legal assistant and as a senior accountant at CPA and accounting firms in the Raleigh–Durham area. From roughly 1989 to 2006 she spent about 16 years at Tecan US (a life-sciences/laboratory-instrumentation company), progressing from Senior Accountant through Accounting Manager, Assistant Controller, and ultimately CFO & Vice President. Between 2007 and 2011 she worked as an independent finance contractor before joining Rankin McKenzie.

Her areas of expertise include cost and inventory accounting, accounting-systems and ERP implementation (e.g., SAP), M&A support (including acquisitions in the software/engineering and medical-services spaces), and international accounting and legal matters. She has also served non-profit clients such as StepUp Ministries.

Educationally, McDermott holds a BA in Political Science from Xavier University and a JD from the University of Maryland School of Law — an unusual law-plus-finance background that supports her work on contracts, M&A, and compliance-heavy engagements.

• No public, verifiable evidence that Jaye McDermott makes angel or seed-stage equity investments. Her professional role is delivering outsourced senior finance leadership (fractional/interim CFO and Controller services), not deploying investment capital.
• Where Rankin McKenzie engages with fundraising, it is on behalf of *client* companies — helping them prepare financials, models, and capital/equity raises — rather than investing the firm's or partners' own money.
• If approached as a finance-leadership advisor, her demonstrated focus areas are: software/SaaS, life sciences and medical services, manufacturing, and not-for-profits; ERP/accounting-systems implementation; cost/inventory accounting; and M&A diligence and integration.