About Our Team

Richard Stanger

Richard Stanger

CEO

Richard is our CEO and a recognized expert on driving growth and profitability at accounting and advisory firms. He specializes in mergers & acquisitions, succession planning, business strategy, leading partner retreats and advising Managing Partners. Prior to founding StangerCarlson, Richard had 20 years of experience as a Managing Partner at PwC where he founded and grew the firm’s human resources consulting business globally. During this period, he played a key role in developing PwC’s business strategy. Following his years at PwC, Richard worked at IBM on a senior executive task force established by IBM’s CEO that refocused IBM’s go-to-market strategy for its 192,000 client-facing professionals. Early in his career, Richard worked for the Joint Congressional Committee of Taxation where he was the primary author of section 401(k) of the tax code.

Bernadette-Cabrera

Bernadette Cabrera

Executive Consultant

Bernadette’s focus is helping Top 100 accounting and advisory firms with their strategic planning, leveraging skills learned as the Chief of Staff for the E&Y Vice Chair, Advisory Services. She also works with firms as an executive coach, helping prepare Partners to assume senior leadership roles and helping high potential future partners to develop the requisite soft skills and subject matter expertise to succeed in a fast-changing business environment. In addition, she coaches teams to high levels of performance on critical projects. Bernadette has more than 20 years of experience working at accounting and advisory firms, including positions at Arthur Andersen and PwC early in her career as well as 15 years working in advisory services at E&Y. Her sweet spots during her consulting career were implementations to meet regulatory compliance, people development, organizational design and change, executive coaching, stakeholder management, communications and training & development. Bernadette is an MBA graduate, as well as a CPA and CIA. She is also accredited by the International Coach Federation.

david-gardner-4

David J. Gardner

Executive Consultant

David J. Gardner is an accomplished Senior Executive and Advisor with more than 25 years of success in the Financial Services, Technology, Business Process Outsourcing and Accounting & Advisory industries. As a former Fortune 100 CIO, his broad areas of expertise include Global IT Strategy and Management, Business and IT Transformation, Cloud Strategy and Deployment, Change and Relationship Management, Business Process Redesign and Outsourcing. David has working at both professional services and Corporate firms, including PwC. Most recently, he was Chief Information Officer for the Corporate Center at AIG, which included Global HR Information Technology across 90+ countries. His sweet spot is large scale HR and Organizational Transformation, includng deployment and operations of applications such as Workday, PeopleSoft, SAP, Ariba, Appian, Cornerstone, and various Life and Policy Administration systems. David is an MBA graduate and an Adjunct Professor of IT and Business Strategy at the CUNY-Baruch College MBA and MIS programs.

Mark Levenfus

Mark Levenfus

Executive Consultant

Mark focuses on helping clients find merger and acquisition partners, assisting firms to develop their business strategies and coaching and advising Managing Partners. Prior to joining StangerCarlson, Mark was Managing Partner of Marks Paneth LLP. Under his leadership, the firm expanded its offerings to become an established provider of sophisticated advisory services, transformed its organization model to align with the industries of its clients, opened new offices significantly expanding the firm’s geographic footprint, successfully acquired and integrated eight firms adding impactful new expertise to the firm’s industry groups and drove the development of a groundbreaking strategy for the firm’s future.

Perry Papp

Perry Papp

Executive Consultant

Perry’s focus is helping clients with their strategic planning and finding merger and acquisition partners in the advisory services area, leveraging his contacts in the consulting industry that he has built over several decades. Perry has over 30 years of experience in the consulting profession with PwC, Deloitte and IBM as well as with smaller organizations. His focus during his consulting career was on people, process and technology transformation, often on a global scale, enabled by ERP and Cloud platforms including Oracle, Workday and SAP. He has extensive experience in the implementation and use of service centers and shared services – both in-house and outsourced – to deliver IT, Finance, CRM, HR and other services to customers.

Diane-Singel

Diane Singel

Executive Consultant

Diane’s focus is helping clients find merger and acquisition partners in the consulting and advisory areas. Her expertise includes identifying broad-based consulting firms for clients with minimal advisory services practices. For these clients, Diane focuses on finding firms with general advisory capabilities encompassing business strategy, business process and IT. Of particular importance in these situations is bringing strong advisory services leadership to our clients to vigorously grow their advisory service lines. Diane also assists clients with finding advisory firm acquisition partners with targeted capabilities in particular areas such as ERP and IT point solutions. Diane’s background is in research, program management and strategic planning.